Buying New Hips

As I was discharging my patient today I noticed that his chart indicated that he had had hip replacement surgery on both his hips not to long ago. He was fairly young so I asked him about why he needed both hips replaced.

“You know how you jump out of a moving car into snow sometimes?” he replied. I have never jumped from any moving vehicle into snow before but I answered yes anyway. “Well I use to do that all the time….but when there was no snow on the ground.”
“Wait,” I replied, “you use to jump out of cars for fun?” He looked at me like it was a stupid question.
“You know like the show jackass? That’s like what we use to do, except we didn’t tape ourselves. We would jump off houses and buildings…stuff like that. Come on you never did stuff like that when you were a kid? Where did you grow up?” When I answered Minnesota he looked even more dumbfounded. “You mean you never jumped off the roof into snow?”
“Nope. I never felt like I wanted to jump off the roof into snow.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing” he said shaking his head and walked off.
Maybe it’s fun to jump off roofs once and a while, but if I’m going to end up with needing new hips before I’m 50 I think I’ll take my chances in missing out.