You might be dysplastic if ...

1. You are under 30 and own a walker, a raised toilet seat and a hip kit.
2. You have said, "it's not a hip replacement, they are breaking my pelvis" more than once in the same day.
3. You are adept at doing the "fist in hand" demonstration of a what a normal hip looks like, followed by what YOURS looks like, followed by how the surgeon will correct it.
4. While carving a turkey, you take the opportunity to demonstrate for your guests how periacetabular osteotomy works using the carving knife, said turkey, and a few screws from the junk drawer in the kitchen. You end up ordering pizza.
5. You are the youngest person in your aquatherapy class.
6. You are the oldest patient at the children's hospital.
7. Before going on any outing you ask, "how far will I have to walk?"
8. You can spell "iliopsoas" and "trochanter."
9. Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. You have hundreds of words for hip pain: snapping, grinding, tin foil, popping, giving way, ripping, tearing, shredding, burning ...
10. Even though you got a "C" in high school biology, you can name and describe the function of every muscle, tendon and bone between your belly button and your knee cap.
11. You practice sleeping on your back so that you'll be ready for the weeks post surgery.
12. You are a woman but you say the word "groin" a lot.
13. You have posted a picture of yourself in a hospital gown on the internet.
14. You have posted pictures of your incision, your x-rays, your hardware, or your surgeon on the internet.
15. You've refinanced your house and/or cashed out your retirement accounts just in case you have to pay for a surgery which your insurance company may, at the last minute, deem "not medically necessary."
16. You have a blog which you update hourly (first week post diagnosis), obsessively (in the months leading up to surgery), daily (the week before surgery), daily with help from a family member or nurse (from the time the epidural comes out until you leave the hospital), bi-weekly (from the time you leave the hospital until you get to throw the damn crutches away), then twice monthly until such time as you just want to get on with your life again. You then update the blog one year after surgery with a picture of your healed incision. Unless ... you need surgery on the other side; if so, repeat.