About Health by Haidee

I’m Haidee Marsh, and Health by Haidee is the account of my own hip replacement, set down in the order it actually happened.

For close to two years before surgery I limped, slept badly, and quietly shrank my life around a worn-out hip. Osteoarthritis is the tidy clinical name for it. What it felt like was giving up small things one at a time: the long walk, the easy flight of stairs, the shoe I could no longer reach to tie. I was 58 when a surgeon finally replaced the joint, and the months either side of that day taught me a great deal that no leaflet had prepared me for.

What I struggled to find beforehand was a plain, ordered, human telling of what lay ahead, written by someone who had lived it rather than performed it. So I kept notes the whole way through and turned them into this.

What you will find here

The full arc of the journey is what I set down, in plain language and from experience:

• How I knew it was finally time to stop putting it off
• What the operation and the first strange weeks were genuinely like
• The hip precautions and the exercises that made the difference
• The setbacks and plateaus, and the slow return to walking without a second thought

Emergencies are outside what I cover, and I am in no position to say whether you need surgery or which approach fits your hip. None of it stands in for advice from your own care team.

How the site stays accurate

Being a patient rather than a doctor, I keep the two roles here apart on purpose. The lived experience is mine. The clinical side, the figures, the cautions, the recognised complications, is checked by orthopaedic surgeon Ms Priya Raman before anything is published. She holds it up against international evidence: World Health Organization guidance, OARSI osteoarthritis recommendations, Cochrane reviews, joint registries, and the peer-reviewed literature. Every article wears its publication, last-updated, and review dates, and there is more on all of this in my Editorial Policy.

Get in touch

Hearing from other people who are facing this surgery, or working their way back from it, means a lot to me. The Contact page will reach me. Please read my Medical Disclaimer as well: what you find here is educational reading and company, not advice pitched at your own situation.