If you find twitter threads bloody awkward, here is the story through the medium of a newspaper.
Extract from Telegraph
Julie was told that a hip arthroscopy operation was the best solution and signed up to have the procedure carried out privately that February.
The surgeon makes up to four small incisions along the front of the hip and is able to perform keyhole surgery inside the joint, identifying and correcting the problems by effectively shaving away the fragments of bone which are catching on each other.
The operation is fairly common and has an 81 per cent rate of success, according to American research in the 2016 Journal of Hip Preservation Surgery, with most people seeing a reduction in pain within six months. But for Julie, the surgery did not signal a fresh start. The operation, she says, “castrated” her.
Part of the problem was that to open up the hip joint so that a surgeon can operate, a piece of equipment called a perineal post had to be placed between the legs, which effectively crushed her genital tissue. None of the hospital literature mentioned it, Julie says, and neither did the surgeon.
However, the pain she felt after the operation, especially to the clitoral region, was “absolutely excruciating”, and worried Julie immediately.
She says: “When the surgeon visited my bedside, I asked him why I was in so much pain in that area. “There was no reassurance, no explanation. He aggressively said: ‘I told you there would be bruising’. I was so shocked and taken back I didn’t say anything. He hadn’t told me this at all.” It took a few months for the bruising and the pain to fade, and Julie started to feel normal.
She says: “Having been single for 10 years, I knew my own body very well. I had always reached orgasm via my clitoris. But I soon realised something was wrong.”
It took Julie two years of online research to find the reason for the damage. She discovered a number of medical reports that recognised the post was known to cause damage to the pudendal nerve. Among them, published in 2013, was a review that revealed that two per cent of patients reported damage, with twice as many women as men affected.
Julie says: “I felt sick. I discovered the pudendal nerve carries sexual sensation from the clitoris. I felt violated.
“I’ve learned since I was at high risk of this type of damage because the muscles in my groin were so short and tight due to the impingement, and the surgeon must have known that and should have warned me.”
Julie has been left devastated. An independent expert agreed she should have been warned of the known risks, but no action has ever been taken against the surgeon and he does not accept he did anything wrong. However, many recent medical articles about nerve damage caused by perineal posts recommend that surgeons alert patients to dangers, including pudendal nerve injury, and sexual and urinary dysfunction.
Telegraph