Life-changing surgery helps former gymnast overcome chronic pain
NORTH TEXAS – Hip surgery is not something you'd think someone in their 20s or 30s would have to go through, but now local doctors tell us it's becoming more common.
As a former gymnast, 27-year-old Taylor Carlisi put a lot of wear and tear on her body at a very young age.
"Starting when I was nine years old, I would be practicing 30 hours a week," she said. "At the time, with the culture of gymnastics, it was kind of just push through it. It's really intense. I remember always being sore. Always having a different injury."
She said long after quitting gymnastics in her teen years, she dealt with debilitating hip pain.
"That's when I started to realize the pain I was experiencing was not normal... when I couldn't just tolerate a simple task like sitting down," she said.
After meeting with different doctors, she learned she had been born with hip dysplasia.
"In the hips' socket, it's really shallow, so the actual top of my leg bone sticks out a little bit more than someone else's," she said. "Doing gymnastics at such an early age, at such an intense level, really exacerbated the issue."
Last year, she met with Dr. Joel Wells, an orthopedic surgeon at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center – McKinney.
"In my practice, I have seen younger patients having more hip injuries," he said, especially among former student-athletes.
"As someone that all I see is hips, hips don't just wear out, usually there's a mechanical reason," he said. "Sometimes kids are training too much, too soon, on one thing. When we're kids, we're still moldable. We're made out of cartilage, so training too early or doing stuff too much, especially at high levels, just puts a lot of pressure on the joints. Especially the hip."
He said for younger patients like Taylor, trying to preserve the native hip is optimal. He recommended a procedure commonly referred to as a PAO.
"It's basically where I do multiple cuts, or 'osteotomies,' around the hip bone to reposition the hip socket," he said.
Taylor said after having this done, recovery was intense.
"My husband, we had been married one year and two days when I had my surgery, so we really put the vows to the test," she said. "It really was all-consuming for the first at least six months trying to learn how to walk before I could start the more intense physical therapy aspect of it."
After all of this, she said she's now pain-free and has been told the results should last a lifetime.
"I went from being in pain simply sitting down to now, I can walk around for two weeks abroad and have no pain at all so it really, really was life-changing," she said.
Taylor decided to celebrate how far she's come by recently dancing the night away at a Taylor Swift concert. It's something she had always dreamed of before!
