It was a Sunday morning. I was up at 5:15AM to head to Prospect Park to volunteer for the NYC Half Marathon. I was going to be an ambassador (their word). It amounted to me saying, “Good morning,” and “Yeah, just go that way,” while freezing my ass off on the west side of the park.

I wanted to do it to get a volunteer credit to do 9 + 1 again to run the marathon a second time in 2020. Oh yes. I’m thinking about that already. I haven’t even run the first one but I’m planning for the second.

Watching all of the runners head towards the starting line reminded me of the excitement of a race day. It got me excited for my upcoming Brooklyn Half in May.

I’m back, baby! All I have to do is follow up with my joint specialist and I can keep running!

And then that prick ruined everything.

I show up at the appointed time of 8:30AM and, as usual, don’t see him until 9:00AM. We chat. I tell him I’ve started running again and confess that it’s been more than his suggested 10 miles per week. He has me lie down on the examining table and then checks me out.

“Pain?”

“No.”

“Good… Pain?”

“No.”

“Good. How about this?”

“Nope.”

“Good.”

I need my all clear from the doc. Look, man, tell me I can run. I get right to it.

I say, “I’d like to run the marathon this year.” From his response, I can tell that I wasn’t clear. I thought that I was implying that I needed to run many miles per week and asking him would that be okay?

He responded, “I would not recommend going over ten miles a week. Anything longer than that and you could make your injury worse.”

Then he showed me that currently I have a small labral tear by tearing a small piece of the examining table paper. Then he said if it gets worse my tear could get worse. He illustrated this by tearing the paper a bit more.

At this point I wondered if this guy is just bad at metaphors of if he honestly thought that I was unfamiliar with the verb tear.

Then he tried to illustrate what was wrong by putting scotch tape over a plastic model of a hip joint. He showed me that it is quite difficult to make scotch tape stick to a plastic model but not much more.

Then he showed me my MRI again and explained a possible surgery. I had googled it. “That’s a nine month recovery time,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, smiling. The dude smiled through everything. I really started to hate it, especially smiling through the phrase, “altering your activities,” when he clearly meant, “stop running.”

“I just told you that I want to run the marathon.”

“Yes. When is it?”

“November.”

And then he did something that made me lose faith in him as a doctor who has any experience with sports. He counted nine months out on his fingers. When he hit finger nine and realized it corresponded to November, he said, “Yes, you will probably not be able to do it if you have surgery,” and smiled through that too.

He had to count the months to realize that I would have to skip the marathon this year. He didn’t instinctively know that a nine month healing process would put me out of commission for this entire year. That was odd.

And then he said, out of the blue, “All of the data points to the fact that you will need a full hip replacement by the age of 55. If you get surgery you will delay it, perhaps until 70 but it is inevitable.”

It was early in the morning. I hadn’t had breakfast yet and I felt faint. I had to sit down.

Look. I’m not a doctor. I also know that I’m not supposed to think that I’m smarter than a doctor just because Google. But you can’t just go off half cocked and tell me something like that.

Here’s what my hypochondria has taught me: there’s a worst case for everything. Find out what it is. Go there in your mind to mentally prepare (or torture yourself, however you wanna see it). Got a headache? Brain tumor. Coughing? Lung cancer. Go on WebMD and type chest pain. They tell you to drop everything and get to a hospital, you’re having a heart attack.

But hip impingement and torn labrum? All of my googling did not yield anyone saying, “Full hip replacement, no question. It’s unavoidable.” Not even the Chicken Little idiots on message boards said anything like that. So, where the hell did this doctor get this data?

This happened a few weeks ago. I’ve had some time to process. Maybe he’s right and maybe I’m just killing the messenger. Maybe I will need a full hip replacement. Eventually. I just think that there’s a whole lot of pain and arthritis and preventative measures between here and then.

The other thing that will happen between now and then is I will go to see a new doctor. I need a second opinion.

Sometimes I picture myself as an old man thankful that I used my body when I could. Other times I picture myself with a cane, taking painful steps, cursing my young, arrogant self.

Other times I picture myself with a kick ass titanium hip. My friend has one. They gave her a card to give to the TSA when she sets off the metal detectors.

I don’t know, that’s kind of kick ass.