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The host of the Mind Your Mind podcast, Tamla Hayes-Buckley, shares her personal struggles with hip dysplasia and the delays and frustrations she has faced in getting the necessary surgery. She discusses the impact on her mental well-being, including unhelpful thinking patterns and fears about the recovery process. Tamla emphasizes the importance of being open about one's struggles and seeking support from loved ones. She highlights the challenges of practicing self-compassion and focusing on the present moment. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Mind Your Mind podcast. I'm your host Tamla Hayes-Buckley and this week's episode is a little bit different in the sense that it is a solo episode with just myself and I'm just going to reflect on some things that have been going on behind the scenes here for myself and the impact that it's having on my own mental well-being because I think it's important to reflect on these things but it's also important to be open about these things. This was the whole point of the podcast is to get people to open up about their mental well-being and to normalise having conversations about mental health and well-being so I felt it was right to talk about what's been going on for me. So to catch everybody up, for anyone who isn't aware, I have a condition called hip dysplasia. I would have been born with this condition but unfortunately it was missed. My parents took me to a private consultant back in 1989 when I was just a couple of months old and their concerns were somewhat dismissed and I was given the all clear. They were told that there was nothing wrong with me and to go about my day and go about my life. About two years ago I had a problem with my knee, my right knee and at the time I was mentioning that my hip seemed to be jolting out of place but that was something that had been occurring for me for quite a while at that point, probably ten years if I went for a long walk or run or anything like that. At the time then, two years ago, it was discovered that I had torn my medial meniscus and that would need surgery. So I had a knee arthroscopy in April of 2022 and at the time, again, my hip issues were put down to being to do with my knee and I was told that, okay, now that your knee is fixed, your hip won't give you any more trouble. But as it happens, my hip did start giving me trouble again and eventually in October of 2022, I got the diagnosis that actually I have hip dysplasia and my right hip never fully formed. The hip socket is not fully formed and it's shallow. It's not as, I suppose, it doesn't have the coverage that it should have for a ball and socket joint. So that then started a whole series of treatments. I was going for physio, I had a steroid injection into the hip and kind of a few different options and it was kind of found that none of those things were giving me relief and surgery was the only option that was available. But because of my age, I'm 35 this year, it was decided that a hip replacement was probably not the most preferable option. So I was put forward for an appointment with a specialist orthopedic surgeon in Dublin. I wrote about this on my blog on the business website, www.rainbowcrescent.ie, during the week and I reflected on how that then kind of kicked off a series of delays, inefficiencies, incompetencies and just all around frustrating series of events that led to about a six month delay in me getting to see that consultant. And his assessment on that day of that consultation was basically that I needed to have this specialist surgery, which is called a periastatabular osteotomy and that it would be done probably between four and six months later. He was leaning towards the four months, which would have been January of this year. We are now over six months since I was told that and during the week, two days after I put that blog live on the website, I got a phone call from the hospital in Dublin to say that my surgery would not take place at the end of March as they had told me in February, but it would possibly be into May. I don't have any solid date for it. I have no even ballpark of when it might happen. So I am back in limbo, in no man's land, wondering what is happening next. And obviously this has had a massive impact on my life from a physical point of view, but it's also had a massive impact on me mentally, which will come as a surprise to nobody really, because I suppose when there is so much uncertainty in your life, it will have a knock-on effect of being hard just to deal with it, just to get your head around not knowing when the surgery is going to happen. I also have the fear of the recovery hanging over me. So I have already been told that the worse condition my hip is in going into the surgery, the harder my recovery will be afterwards. That's the general consensus of the consultant orthopaedic surgeons that I've spoken to, the anaesthetists and other doctors that I have encountered in this whole debacle. And obviously because I have been dealing with this for so long and I have been deteriorating quite rapidly over the last couple of months, to me that would mean that my recovery is going to be quite difficult. And that then leads into, I suppose, an unhelpful thinking pattern that I discussed with Emily Murphy from The Mind Mechanic on Season 2, Episode 4 of the podcast. Fortune-telling is something that I have found myself kind of getting stuck in and catastrophizing. They kind of come hand in hand of this fortune-telling, trying to tell the future of how things are going to go with my recovery, the what-ifs, the ifs, buts and ands, I suppose, of the recovery. And it's hard to know how things are going to go. It obviously is. Everybody is different and it's a very individual thing how people recover after surgeries, all that kind of thing. But I suppose the fact that the thought has been put in my mind by multiple people that I have encountered, I have been second-guessing how I'm going to recover, how I am going to cope with the recovery as well. I have certain things that I do to look after my mental well-being and I know that I'm not going to be able to do some of those things during the recovery. So one thing that I know I've spoken about on the podcast previously was going down to the beach. It's something that I do every day if I can, or every second day if the weather is bad or if I'm quite sore with my hip. But I do still try to get down there every single day. I might not get out for a walk because I can't walk for any great distance at the moment, but I'll go down, I'll open the window, have a chat to someone if they're down, if there's anybody else down there, or I might just sit there and literally listen to the sound of the waves and get that sea air into me. And I find that it does really help me. But obviously, if I am going to be off my feet for quite a considerable period of time after the surgery, that's not something that I'm going to be able to do. And that scares me a little bit because it's quite isolating. And also, it's tricky for me because these are things that I have put in place since the major, I suppose, breakdown in my mental health in 2020 into 2021. And I've been quite steadfast in the things that I do to look after my mental well-being. So to know that some of those things are going to be not available to me is quite scary. And it's something that I have been working on quite a bit in counselling, actually. So I've been back in counselling since December and it's going really well. I'm back with my original counsellor who I had seen back in 2020 into 2021. And she's a wonderful counsellor. She's someone who really gets me and we click very well. And she knows what the things that I do to look after myself. And the fortune telling is something that we have really been working on the last couple of weeks because I have found that it has got me quite down thinking about not being able to do those things. And so what I'm focusing on right now is what I can do, I suppose, right now and focusing on the present and very much, I suppose, trying to get out of my head and into living in the present moment, doing the things that I need to do right now to look after my mind, my body. And I suppose to also even just air those things to people. So I have definitely improved on opening up and talking to people, telling people how I'm feeling. And even when I got this news about the surgery being delayed again, I automatically rang my husband, which is not something I would have done. It seems like such a small thing. But back when I was really struggling with my mental health, I went into shutdown mode. I used to just try to run away from my feelings and my thoughts and my emotions and everything. And I'm really opening up at the moment. I spoke to my husband. I spoke to my parents. I text, I think it was about six of my friends to tell them what was happening just so that people were in the loop and knew that, OK, there's something going on and it's not good. It's not good news. I'm not having a great day of it. And just being able to talk and air my thoughts and my feelings. And it really, really helped because it also got me out of my head in the sense that I needed to talk through logically what had happened and explain to other people what had happened and the conversation that I had had with the person from the hospital. And I'm really trying to focus on that right now. And I know that as someone who is now working in the coaching space, it can seem like it's, oh, it's really easy. Like you just exchange your thoughts or exchange your beliefs or whatever and off you go. But it's not. It's really hard. And I don't ever want anyone consuming my content on Instagram or be it to the podcast to think that it's easy to do these things because it's not. It takes practice opening up. It takes practice to want to learn about your thinking patterns and change them or challenge them. And that's what I'm kind of going through at the moment. I know all about unhelpful thinking patterns. I know all about, you know, the things that you shouldn't be doing or and I use it shouldn't in inverted commas because I suppose that is a very loaded word for a lot of people. But I know all of them. But it's much harder to put things into practice for yourself and show yourself that self-compassion. So that's really what I'm working on at the moment. Working on that self-compassion piece and just looking after myself. And I suppose the Mind Your Mind podcast page on Instagram has been quieter than usual. It definitely has reflected in the content I am both consuming and creating. And I suppose I really wanted to put this episode out there for anyone who might be struggling as well that it is hard. It's an acknowledgement of it being hard and also the importance of being able to open up and why I started this podcast in the first place. Because I've experienced the stigma. I've experienced, you know, the people rolling their eyes to heaven when I start talking about mental health. But I also know the power of it and that's exactly why I did open up on Wednesday. I made, you know, phone calls to some people that I needed to make phone calls to and I talked to some people that I needed to talk to, to kind of keep things ticking over, you know, from a work point of view, from a health point of view, from a life point of view. And yeah, that's the big thing that I wanted to talk about today. And I hope that it does resonate with some people. It is a shorter episode today because it's just me. And if you take anything from today, it is, please, please, if you do find yourself fortune telling or catastrophizing or any of those things, my biggest piece of advice is just open up, tell someone. And it is such a cliche, but a problem shared is a problem halved and all that sort of thing. But, you know, as cliche as that sounds, it is true that, you know, by sharing our problems, we are somewhat halving them because actually the catastrophizing that you've done, you might be able to take that out of the equation a little bit because I think not one of us can say that, oh, I've faced a problem and I didn't think of the worst case scenario or I didn't automatically go to hell for leather on the, what if this happens and what if this happens and what if this happens? And then if all of those things happen, this awful thing is going to happen, you know, and it's totally hypothetical and it's natural. The human mind is geared towards a negative bias. It's geared towards just negativity. We have negative automatic thoughts in our mind all of the time. And I wrote a blog about that actually as well this week over on the business page. And I'll share those in the show notes, those blog posts. And I suppose I've done an awful lot of reflecting on this this week because this is what I am going through right now. And if anyone else is going through a hard time where there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of stress, a lot of frustration. And for me, there has been a lot of anger as well, anger at how many delays there's been, anger at some of the treatment I've got from certain people, anger at how dismissive certain people have been to me, anger at just the whole situation, anger at my body for being the way it is. So I suppose, long story short, just talk to people. Just please open up to someone, anyone, and mind yourself if you are going through a period of uncertainty. It can be very stressful. It can create a lot of angst, a lot of worry, a lot of stresses, a lot of anxiety, and just a lot of feelings. So I hope that you look after yourself. I hope that you open up. And I'll talk to you next week with a new episode of the Mind Your Mind podcast.