‘I’m Pain-Free Now’ — An Active Lifestyle Restored After Minimally Invasive Hip Surgery

Throughout her years in school and afterward as she took part in many sports and workouts, Adriana Collado dealt with a discomforting pain in her hips. After a few years, the pain was constant and “completely unbearable,” she recalls.

“I started playing sports at a very young age,” she said. “I played volleyball in high school. I worked out at the same time after high school. I started power lifting. All throughout the years, I felt a lot of pain in my hips, specifically in my right hip. And after a few years, I just started feeling pain getting out of bed, sleeping, and walking from Point A to Point B. The hip pain got completely unbearable and I decided it was time to see the doctor.”

After five years of pain that interrupted her active lifestyle, Ms. Collado, age 26, would consult with Lionel E. Lazaro, M.D., orthopedic surgeon with Baptist Health’s Miami Orthopedics & Sports Medicine Institute.

“During our conversation and exam, we found that she’s having some conflict or bony impingement,” explains Dr. Lazaro. “It’s a conflict between the bones in her hip that are creating early contact that is leading to injury. And we were able to confirm that with the diagnostic examinations.”

Ms. Collado’s pain was attributed to the labrum, a cartilage that seals the rim of the socket in the hip. It is fragile and can tear or cause pain. But it serves an important role in the prevention of arthritis, achieving athletic performance, stability and cartilage health.

Dr. Lazaro performed a “segmental labral reconstruction,” a minimally invasive arthroscopic hip surgery in which the damaged or deficient acetabular (cup-shaped) labrum is replaced with healthy tissue graft.

Ms. Collado said she felt reassured when Dr. Lazaro told her about the surgery. “After running all the tests and Dr. Lazaro determined that I did need hip surgery, I was actually pretty relieved because I didn’t know that there was going to be a solution to this. And after he said that, he made me feel very confident — the fact that the surgery would go smoothly and it wasn’t such a long recovery.”

At Miami Orthopedic & Sports Medicine Institute, teams of experts utilize minimally invasive surgical treatments to treat bone impingement and to repair or reconstruct soft tissues that have been torn or otherwise compromised.

“With Ms. Collado, we were able to do a segmental labral reconstruction,” explains Dr. Lazaro. “We just put in a piece of graft to fill up that defect. And in her case, it worked out very nicely. I was able to restore the suction seal of the hip joint and that’s very important for the hip biomechanics. Right now, she’s doing extremely well. She healed very well. She’s been able to perform without any pain and I’m extremely happy because of that.”

Ms. Collado says she is finally free of her hip pain, enabling her to resume her workouts.

“So, now I do feel great,” she says. I don’t have any pain anymore when I’m walking and when I’m sleeping. It’s kind of weird to feel how my hip is supposed to feel because I’ve dealt with pain all my life. So, now I’ve started working out again and everything is going nice and smoothly. I can get back to running, which is something I was never able to do before. So, it’s nice to see that I’m pain-free now.”