Some of you may remember this: it’s the x-ray I had done of my hip last summer. I would desperately love another one, but so far no-one has offered. If you look on the right hand side, where the ‘ball’ fits into the ’socket’ you can see how much narrower the gap between them is than on the right. If you look even more carefully, you can see how my left-hand side (that’s on your right) is a lot less well developed than the right.
The reason I’m having all this bother now is because I had Congenital Hip Dysplasia (CDH) but it wasn’t discovered until I was about three months old. Apparently one of the causes can be a lack of amniotic fluid in pregnancy: that never made much sense until I saw the x-ray, but I’m guessing if there wasn’t much room for mini-me to swim about in, then maybe everything might end up a bit squished. Certainly my mum likes to boast that she had a nice, neat bump when she was carrying me, and I can well believe it, because she’s not the sort who would’ve sat about eating cake for two for nine months!
Not that my mum talks about it much. I know it was an incredibly difficult time for her – and no doubt my dad, too. One minute she had a baby with odd-length legs, the next she’s being told I have a serious condition and I spend most of the next two or three years in an orthopaedic hospital. I spent my first birthday there. And I wonder why our relationship is so weird and screwy sometimes…
