Thanks for the update. I am actually going in on the 24th. I have my Pre-Op appt. next Tuesday. Right now I am just busily trying to get all my shit done so the sub teacher doesn't screw up my curriculum while I am gone. I have read some posts online about items that made being laid up easier. Have any suggestions? Right now I am looking at a long handled luffe (sp?) for bathing and some warm socks.
Also just curious - what are your rehab appts like?
Something to put your socks on, like a claw type thing, will definitely make things easier. Socks and shoes were the biggest struggle. Thankfully I have a significant other that was around to help me, if there was something that I couldn't do. Although I didn't need help very often, I also was not above asking for help. My buddy came to pick me up when my fiance was out of town and I was not allowed to be driving - I warned him that he might need to help me put on my right sock and shoe. Thankfully I was able to put on a shorter pair of socks and squeeze my feet into shoes. He did have to tie my shoe once and all the women at our gym got a good laugh out of it.
Other than that, I was doing a lot more than the doctor prescribed. I drove much sooner than he said I could in the beginning, I was off crutches early, I'm breaking 90 degrees when I wasn't supposed to be there yet - all those sort of things made it much easier to cope.
As far as Physical Therapy and what I do while I am there... I was given quite a few isolation exercises to work on and a handful of stretches. Most are performed with little to no resistance in the beginning and then gradually move to resistance bands or weights. We just sort of hopped right into the resistance bands for myself. I just did ankle weights for the first time yesterday. We are way ahead of the doctor's rehab protocol and without being arrogant - I kind of run my own PT but with input from the therapist. In recent years, I have only been training 'functional' exercise movements and not isolation movements - but earlier in life, I performed those sort of movements and I am well read on most of the stuff. The therapist starts pulling things out to set me up for an exercise and then starts explaining it and I just sort of hop on or do whatever he's about to describe because I know where he is heading with the concepts. He has definitely provided me with different takes on movements from what I would have done but in all honesty, the greatest help that he has offered is answering my questions and being a sounding board to reconfirm that I am not screwing things up. I have no personal experience with having been operated on, so although I know the movements, how to teach them, warning signs and those sort of things, before this, I did not know how those movements actually felt for someone who has been through surgery. So he's helpful when I am pushing myself further than the doctor's protocol to ask him things and say, hey, am I nuts here or is this okay? I took it upon myself to turn the standard 10 minute recumbent bike warm up into 10 minutes of interval training.
For instance, yesterday I asked him where the actual protocol said I was supposed to be at this point since I have basically thrown it away and abandoned it. He looked the file over and said oh, well you aren't supposed to be breaking 90 degrees yet, so we'll work up to that. Then he said wait a minute, you were just going past 90 degrees. I said yeah, last friday I grabbed a 26lb kettlebell and did a goblet squat past 90 degrees and I was going past 90 when we were doing stabilization squats on a bosu ball. So in reality, I am not supposed to break 90 until after week 6. I was breaking 90 by the end of week 3. The second phase goes to week 6-10. I can do all things there but walk with a normal gait.
Long story short, your PT will have you do exercises to strengthen your core muscles (including pelvis, hip, thigh) that involve adduction, abduction, flexion, extension, internal rotation and external rotation. You'll have to be able to demonstrate that you can move in all of those planes of motion without pain before they consider you recovered. There will also have to be adequate time for the bone to heal if they're doing any sort of work on your bone and time for the issue/ligaments to heal for any surgery to the soft tissue. While you regain all of that function, you'll get back to normal walking. Right now I still sort of shuffle at times because the muscles in my groin have shortened which make my stride shorter and my leg turnover is not as quick as it should be because the muscles (mainly hip flexor) aren't as strong as before.
Last note - I have learned that the hip labrum is significantly different than the shoulder labrum. Because of the location and function of the shoulder labrum, it is a much more difficult surgery and is much more responsible for holding your shoulder in its socket. The hip labrum is more about creating a seal for the hip in the socket, but there's enough bone and musculature (in the shoulder, there's very little bone to hold things in - just 2 points and the rest is all muscle) to keep everything from dislocating.