Alec Baldwin shares details of hip-replacement surgery: 'Incredibly painful'

Alec Baldwin, recuperating at home from his second hip-replacement surgery, is sharing details about the recent procedure and its aftermath.

“I had my left hip done in 2018, five years ago, and I had the other one done” on May 30, the three-time Emmy Award winner, 65, says in an Instagram video. Unshaven, his hair uncombed, wearing a Lyle & Scott burgundy crew neck T-shirt, he muses that, “The pain goes away gradually … although I'm told with my conversations with orthopedic doctors and their patients, my friends who’ve been through this, that their knee surgery is even more painful. But it is painful,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s incredibly painful. But as we keep saying in my house, ‘It’s the pain that’s going to end the pain.’”

He had needed the surgery “done at least two years ago and [instead I] walked around and limped. I mean, I really did myself no favors, because the compensatory damage you do to your back and your neck and your feet and everything else, your knees, is not great. So to limp around with this condition for two years was tough. But,” he explains, “I didn’t have the time to do it work-wise or schedule wise. I didn’t have four to six weeks to kind of limit myself that way.”

Additionally, says the Amityville-born and Massapequa-raised actor, who has a home in Amagansett, “My glucose issues affected that. So it was very tough. We’d line up a date to do the surgery and I would fail my blood-sugar test. … But I got all that together and we had the operation done. And it hurts. It really, really hurts,” he says with another chuckle.

He was given painkillers the night after that morning’s surgery, he says, but did not like how they affected him. “Man, I haven’t been that high since 1977,” he jokes. “It’s incredible and I just couldn’t take it, because you can’t function. I don’t think they really kill the pain as much as they shut your brain off [so that] you don't really experience the pain.”

Baldwin had his first hip replacement in February 2018. More than 450,000 hip replacements and approximately 790,000 total knee replacements are performed annually in the United States, according to the medical professional association the American College of Rheumatology. The procedure, used to alleviate pain and ambulatory issues due to arthritis and other inflammatory joint problems, removes worn cartilage from both sides of the joint and resurfaces the joint with a metal and plastic implant.