Hip Update and a Tiny Bit of “Tech”

I thought I’d give you a little bit of an update on how I’m doing after the big hip surgery of 2026. The good news is that every single day I find something I can do that I couldn’t do right after the surgery or even just a few days before. Just being able to lift my left leg when sitting in a chair seems like a small thing, but being able to do it now when I couldn’t two weeks ago is astonishing! I can sleep on my right (good) side for nearly 45 minutes, while a week ago the left hip hurt too much to do that. I can take unsupervised showers now (with a shower chair) which gives me some dignity back.

I have physical therapy rehab at home twice a week, which isn’t nearly as often as I wanted, but my PT guy, Kris, is really good at his job. He listens to me and what I want to accomplish, and then starts working me towards that. For example, until only recently, it was very painful to get in and out of bed. Something about the twisting motion required caused shooting pains in my hip joint. I told him about it, and he showed me a way to get out of bed pain-free. I didn’t need his trick for very long, because now it doesn’t hurt to get out of bed, but I sure appreciated it for the few days I needed his method!

As I’ve mentioned before, I propel myself around the house with a walker, where I’m only allowed to balance on my left toe and then full weight on my right leg. They call it “toe touch weight bearing”. I’m stuck in this mode till April first, and then I can finally start walking on the bad leg.

I will still have to use a walker, mostly for stability. That won’t be nearly as annoying, but it’s to last for another eight weeks. While, I’m really looking forward to not having the entire weight of my body on my arms, using a walker at all times means that it’s incredibly difficult to carry anything. For example, after Steve has made our meal, since I can’t really help, he has to carry all of the dishes over to the table. He then has to clear all of the dishes at the other end. He doesn’t complain, but I bet this is getting real old for him as well.

I do have a couple of assistive tech tools that help me with this, although I may be stretching the word tech to its extremes.

Walker Basket

While I was in the rehab hospital, my occupational therapist, Jen, suggested Steve bring in one of those white plastic bags you get at the grocery store if you forget to bring your own. We modified it a little bit to have it hang off the side of the walker so I could at least carry a few things around.

Before I left the rehab hospital, it occurred to me that perhaps technology existed for this exact problem to be solved that was a bit more elegant than a plastic bag.

On Amazon, I found the Rhino Valley Walker Basket. This is a rectangular open canvas basket that is 15.75″D x 0.79″W x 9.65″H and weighs less than a pound. It connects to the walker via a series of Velcro straps. In the picture on Amazon, the front of the walker is a straight bar, but I don’t think any walkers are straight at the front. They are normally arced out to make room for your body to move forward. As a result, it doesn’t fit as cleanly as it looks in the images.

The Rhino Valley Walker Basket also sports little slot pockets on the front to hold things like phones, notebooks, and pens, as well as a circular pocket for a water bottle. I happen to use a fairly small diameter water bottle that I got from the fine folks at One Password, but if you have one of the larger ones, it definitely won’t fit. Likewise, it’s unlikely that you own a phone that would fit into any of the little slot pockets.

I tend to use the large cavern just to throw things into and then carry them across the room and put them away. This means I can pick up my own laundry and maybe carry something back to the kitchen if it doesn’t have any liquid in it. It’s definitely limited, but it provides me with some autonomy, like being able to carry my own clothes to the shower.

The main reason I wanted to bring up this basket is because of those useless thin slots at the front. I figured out a perfect use for them. Before my injury, if I needed to get up in the middle of the night, I could usually make it to the bathroom and back without running into anything. However, you may remember a few years ago when I broke my toe stubbing it on the table that’s at the foot of our bed, executing this maneuver, so it isn’t without its dangers. Being in my more delicate condition now, tripping over a dog toy or a cat in the middle of the night could be catastrophic.

I clearly needed a light source, but one that didn’t wake up Steve. I use a case on my iPhone made by a company called Torras that I’ve told you about in the past. The reason I like the Taurus cases is that they have a little pop-out ring that you can use as a way to secure the phone in your hand or to create a little stand.

It turns out that I can slide that little ring partially open into the front of the walker, which then faces the iPhone’s screen forward in front of me. If I tap on the phone without unlocking it, it lights up. It’s not bright like having the phone on, but it’s light enough to give me a little beacon to make my way to the bathroom and back, and it doesn’t awaken Steve.

Grabber Reacher Tool

I told you about the nifty hip kit that we bought that included such amazing technology as the sock aid. If you missed that excitement, I put a link to that article in the notes.

In that article, I neglected to mention the handiest thing in that kit. It’s called a grabber reacher tool. It’s a 32-inch-long tool that has a pistol grip on one end that you squeeze. When you do that, two fingers pull together with a rubber grip at the other end. I always thought this was silly, but I probably use this five or six times a day.

One of the reasons it’s so useful is that you can easily collapse it to half its full length. It actually fits inside my little walker basket when collapsed

I can pick up anything light, including Kepler’s toys that he is wont to leave about on the floor, and fling them towards his basket. My accuracy isn’t great, but at least it gets them out of my way. Picking up clothes is easy, but heavier things can be a challenge. It’s still pretty strong, though.

A couple of times, my laptop bag containing my MacBook Air and my 13″ iPad Pro has been lying flat on the ground too far for me to reach. I was able to grab the handle of the laptop bag, lift it up and rotate it onto its bottom, and then drag it over to where I could reach it standing at the walker. I certainly can’t lift the backpack, but being able to move that much weight was pretty impressive!

I put a picture of the grabber reacher tool in the show notes with a link to Amazon for a $15 version of the tool. This isn’t unique — you can find a ton of different ones in different colors and with different grips and possibly lower prices. I plan on keeping this thing around for reaching under the couch to get things like Kepler’s toys again, and maybe things that have fallen down behind the desk. Heck, I could probably use it to grab cables that have fallen down, couldn’t I?! I may buy more of these.

If you find yourself worrying about me, please send some of your mental energy towards Steve because he’s doing yeoman’s work here. He has to help me up and down the stairs every time, he has to do all of the cooking, and dishes, and dog walking, and carrying every little thing from downstairs to upstairs and back and even a cross a room. I try to thank him every single time, and he’s not showing any signs of wear just yet, but I do worry about him.

I know this hasn’t been the deepest tech story I’ve ever written, but I hope you’ll bear with me over the coming weeks while I try to get my legs back under me … literally.