Margaret Johnson Facebook ad: “Read This If Hip Pain Is Stealing Your Life”

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If you've been told you need a hip replacement, please don't sign anything yet. I signed mine eighteen months ago and today I walk with a stick. Please read what I've learned before you sign the consent form. My name is Margaret Johnson. I'm 64, I live in a quiet town in the Midlands, and I retired three years ago after thirty years as a senior care assistant in a residential care home. My husband Tony is 66, a retired postman. We have two grown children and four grandchildren we'd waited our whole lives to enjoy. We were supposed to be doing the things you save up for. Holidays in Cornwall. Days out with the grandchildren. The garden I'd been planning since I retired. Instead I'm sitting in the kitchen writing this, with a walking stick leant against my chair. The hip pain started in 2020. A dull ache in the right groin walking up the garden path. We thought it was wear and tear, a bit of rest and it would settle. It never settled. The X-ray showed bone-on-bone osteoarthritis in the right hip. Advanced. The GP wrote me the same prescription she writes for everybody. Lose half a stone, take paracetamol, try ibuprofen if it gets worse. By month nine I was on co-codamol most evenings. Then omeprazole because the daily ibuprofen had burned my stomach. One pill for the pain. Another pill to protect my stomach from the first pill. By year two I was waking at three in the morning every single night. The deep burning in the groin, radiating down the front of the thigh. I'd get up, go downstairs slowly holding both bannisters, take a paracetamol, wait for it to take the edge off, come back to bed. I'd moved into the spare bedroom because Tony has a bad back of his own and needs his sleep. Forty-one years of marriage and I was sleeping down the corridor. By month fifteen I couldn't bend the hip enough to put my own socks on. My daughter ordered me a sock aid from Argos for twelve pounds. I cried when she opened the parcel. That was the physical side. There was another side too. The money side. I tried glucosamine, turmeric, marine collagen, magnesium tablets. Forty-two pounds a month from Holland and Barrett for over a year. Over five hundred pounds in total. My GP confirmed my blood magnesium was within normal range. Not a noticeable difference in the deep groin pain. I tried Voltarol gel from Boots. Nineteen pounds fifty a tube. Worked for ten minutes on the surface. Smelled medicinal. Didn't reach the joint capsule two inches below the skin where the actual pain was sitting. I tried magnetic patches from the Daily Mail. I tried a copper sleeve my daughter sent me from Manchester. I tried six sessions of NHS physiotherapy. Glute bridges, hip flexor stretches, clamshells. Eight weeks later the pain was identical. I had two steroid injections. Eighteen days of relief each time, then it all came back, worse if anything. If I added it all up, over the years I'd spent the better part of a thousand pounds on things that never moved the pain. Money I'd put away from my care assistant wages over thirty years. Money Tony had put away from his postman's pension. Gone. Nothing to show for it except a kitchen drawer full of half-used tubes and bottles. The NHS letter came thirteen months in. Total hip replacement scheduled fourteen months later. When the surgery date finally came round, I was relieved. I thought I was finally getting out of the loop. The consultant told me hip replacement had a very high success rate. He said most patients are walking again within weeks. He was kind. He didn't lie. He just didn't tell me everything. And here is where I made my mistake. I didn't ask any more questions. I didn't take a week to think. I didn't read anything. I'd been in pain for nearly four years and I just wanted it over. I signed the consent form that afternoon. I rushed it. I had the right hip replaced. Four nights in hospital. The first eight weeks at home were the hardest thing I'd ever been through, but I did every exercise the physiotherapist gave me. I was walking with one crutch by week ten. Then around week twelve the pain came back. Not the original bone-on-bone burning. A different pain. Deep, hot, around the new joint. A grinding feeling on certain movements. The consultant said it was settling. These things take time, Mrs Johnson. Sometimes a year, sometimes longer. By month six post-op I was still on co-codamol every evening. By month nine I was back on the omeprazole. By month twelve I was waking at three in the morning again, exactly like before the surgery, with the same hip burning. The hip I'd been operated on. I went back to the consultant. He examined me, looked at the X-ray, said the implant was perfectly placed. He told me I was unlucky. I asked him whether this was common. He paused for a moment. He said about one in five patients still has chronic pain twelve months after a total hip replacement. One in five. Twenty per cent. I had never heard that statistic before in my life. Not from him. Not from the leaflet they gave me before signing the consent. Not from anyone. If anyone had told me before the surgery that I had a one in five chance of going through major joint replacement surgery and ending up no better, I would have taken a week. I would have read something. I would have asked questions. I wouldn't have signed that afternoon. That was eighteen months ago. Today I walk with a stick most days. I can't get down on the floor for my grandchildren. I can't go up the stairs without holding both bannisters. I can't sleep on my right side because the new joint still burns at night. I still need the sock aid every morning. The other hip is starting to ache too and the consultant has gently mentioned I'll probably need that one done eventually as well. I told him I'd think about it. This time I'm taking my time. Four months ago a close friend of ours, Christine, rang me. She'd been on the NHS waiting list for fifteen months for her right hip. She'd just had her pre-op consultation. The surgery date was eight weeks away. Her husband had been pushing her to just get on with it. She wanted to know what to expect. I sat on the phone and I told her the truth. Everything I've just written here. I told her about the one in five. I told her I'd been the one in five. I told her I'd give anything to go back and take more time before I signed. She went quiet for a long time. Then she asked me what she should do instead. I didn't have an answer at that point. I'd spent eighteen months looking for one. I told her I'd keep looking and I'd let her know. That night I sat at the kitchen table at three in the morning, like I do most nights now, and I started reading properly for the first time. Articles I'd never thought to read before. Patient forums on Mumsnet I'd never seen. Videos from senior NHS physiotherapists. I read about something called central sensitisation. It's what happens when chronic hip pain becomes its own thing, separate from the original joint problem. The longer the joint has been bone-on-bone, the more the deep muscles around it have locked up, and the more the nerves around it have been firing wrong. The less likely the surgery is to fully fix the pain even when the new joint is perfectly placed. That is why one in five never recover. The surgery changes the joint. It doesn't change the locked muscle around the joint. It doesn't change the irritated nerves that have been misfiring for years. Then I found something specific. An article written by a recently retired NHS consultant orthopaedic surgeon. He'd performed over three thousand hip replacements in his thirty-one year career. He'd written it after his own wife had been on the waiting list. He explained that hip pain has four mechanisms feeding into each other, twenty-four hours a day. The deep gluteal and hip flexor muscles surrounding the joint go into permanent over-firing, locked up trying to compensate for the worn cartilage. Blood circulation to the joint capsule collapses. The connective tissue and fascia stiffen, which is why I'd lost the ability to put my own socks on. And the deeper peri-articular nerve endings, sitting two inches below the skin around the joint, become inflamed and start misfiring. That is the burning at three in the morning. The article described a red light therapy hip belt designed specifically for these four mechanisms. Medical-grade heat at three controlled levels, deep enough to release the locked muscle no over-the-counter heat patch ever reaches. Two independent massage motors at six thousand RPM driving circulation back into the starved tissue around the joint. The same percussion frequency a private sports therapist charges fifty-five pounds a session for. An adjustable compression wrap holding the joint in continuous gentle pressure to drain the accumulated inflammatory waste. And one hundred and five medical-grade red-light LEDs at six hundred and sixty nanometres. The wavelength documented to penetrate two to three inches into the soft tissue around the joint and signal those inflamed nerves to repair. The same wavelength a private clinic in London charges eighty pounds a session for. The article explained why my magnesium tablets had never worked. Oral magnesium goes through the gut and distributes evenly across the entire bloodstream. Less than one per cent ever reaches a locked, starving muscle around an osteoarthritic hip. My blood test had been normal because my blood was normal. The tissue around my hip had not been. It was the kind of support I should have been offered before the surgery, not after. I ordered the belt. I told Christine to order one too. We agreed we'd use it twice a day for two months and compare notes. The first night I wrapped it round my hip before bed. Twenty minutes on the highest heat setting, dual motor at medium, red light running. I slept four hours straight on my left side. The first time in over fourteen months. By week three the burning around my replaced hip had calmed enough that I cut my evening co-codamol in half. The omeprazole went in the bin a week later because I'd stopped the daily Brufen. By week six I was walking the dog around the village again. Slowly, but without the stick on good days. Christine rang me at the start of week four. She'd been using hers morning and night, twenty minutes a session. She'd cancelled her surgery the previous Tuesday. She told her consultant's secretary she wanted to wait six months and review. The consultant phoned her back personally. He said in his experience, when patients find proper conservative support during the wait, sometimes the surgery becomes unnecessary entirely. She's been off the waiting list for three months now. She's walking better than she was at any point in the year before her scheduled date. The sock aid she'd ordered three weeks before her surgery is still in the Argos packaging. I don't know if my own hip will ever fully recover. I'm one of the 20% and the operation can't be undone. But every evening I wrap the belt around for twenty minutes before bed, every morning I do another twenty minutes after my tea, and every night I sleep a little better. If you have a hip replacement date in the diary, or your husband or your wife has one in the diary, please take a week before you sign anything. Read what I read. Don't rush the way I did. You can read the full article at the link below. I wish someone had put it in front of me before March 2024. It might have saved me a great deal more than just my hip.

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Read This If Hip Pain Is Stealing Your Life ☝️

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