Moondog55 wrote:Arapiles the queue for a THR is about 2 years for urgent cases, mine was urgent, but for none-urgent cases it can take up to 5 years or more to actually get up on the slab, until then believe me you really do need the drugs, lots of drugs and often.
I was once in the public system for an ACL so I understand the waits - but it's presumably not impossible to get checked out by an orthopaedic surgeon and get their opinion.
Re the drugs, I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis in 2006 and I finally had the Adept operation this year, 12 years later. In the interim I usually only needed panadol, and then only on the one or two days every couple of months that the osteocytes were depositing on the joint. I don't think that I have a high pain threshold, but instead the fact that I was fit, kept my weight down and was active in mostly non-weight bearing exercise kept it under control. My experiences with people who rely on drugs for medical conditions is that there's a cascade effect that causes other problems.
By the way, what do you count as XXL? I'm 90kg in my socks, so I'm not exactly a lightweight.