Dislocated hip emergency calls for unusual rescue

An Auckland man with a dislocated hip forced paramedics to think outside the box when called to free him from his third-storey bedroom.

The 57-year-old lawyer - who had already had seven hip operations - rolled over in bed one night last month and felt it go.

"It doesn't take much to dislocate my hip," said the man, who asked not to be named.

But when paramedics arrived at the Freemans Bay home they were faced with a problem.

Unable to bend at the waist, the 1.82m man - whose hip joint is made from chromium, cobalt, titanium and tantalum - had to be laid out on a stretcher that could not be manouevred down the narrow staircase so some lateral thinking was required.

With a system of ropes and pulleys, the man was winched out of the window and lowered, storey by storey, to the ground.

"The amazing thing was that no one in the townhouse complex woke up," he said.

His wife praised fire and ambulance staff for their quick thinking.

"They did such an amazing job. We now need the firemen to come back and help move the bedroom furniture down to the downstairs bedroom," she joked.

The man was taken to Auckland City Hospital to have his hip put back in.

He hoped a hip operation next week would fix the problem for good.