Another report from the front line

They say pride comes before a fall, but I’m happy to record today that I now feel I’m ‘on the up’ as regards recovering from my hip operation (eight weeks ago this coming Friday).

I won’t bother you with an exhausting recap. Suffice it to say that, after an initial period of making swift progress, I ‘stalled’ about a month ago and got stuck having to walk with one stick – or else, if I discarded it, having to imitate Kenneth More playing Douglas Bader in the movie Reach For The Sky. It turned out that an admin cock-up had held me back – I didn’t get to see a physio for the first time until a fortnight later than intended – but even that didn’t quite account for my slow progress.

Yesterday was the occasion of my first trip to be assessed by a member of the surgeon’s team after my op.

All things considered, it all went well.

Like many people, past experience had taught me that sitting in the ‘waiting area’ of any hospital or clinic is something that nobody should approach with any sense of anticipation.

‘Hospital time’ – rather like ‘airport time’ – tends to exist in a fourth dimension in which normal human time is inexorably ‘elongated’ and your traditional mental reaction is to ‘shut down and switch off’ in a state akin to cryonic suspension. It’s the only or best way to cope.

Having prepared in advance for a ‘slow day’, I was already slightly discombobulated by the smooth passage of my arrival. I found a parking bay right outside the clinic [almost literally, such extreme good fortune has never previously come my way], was directed upstairs to the first floor, ‘registered’ at reception that I had arrived … and also somehow managed to ‘register’ my car on the computer to which I was directed for the purpose first time without a hitch because I happened to remember my car registration number without having to retrace my steps to the car park in order to note it down on a scrap of paper.

Having moved to the waiting area, my body naturally began cooling down in preparation for my cryonic suspension. Because I’d forgotten to bring a newspaper with me (as intended) I had nothing to read and so I began nodding off. As you can imagine, therefore, when within ten minutes my name was suddenly called out – almost exactly at the scheduled time of my appointment – the shock to my system was considerable.

The nurse accompanying me to the consulting room took off at a brisk walking pace and I followed, Kenneth-More-ing as best I could. She introduced me to what (to all intents and purposes) presented as a teenage male wearing a fancy-dress doctor’s outfit, but who in fact turned out to be an important member of my surgeon’s team.

My consultation took all of fifteen minutes, if that. He asked how I had been and I gave him a classic Ingolby stand-up monologue, complete with well-worked out what appeared (to onlookers) to be apparently impromptu gags, on all aspects of my medical history since the operation had taken place.

Only it wasn’t so much a ‘stand up’ routine as a sitting down one, i.e. beside his desk.

In summary – even after he examined my scar – the kid told me that everything seemed to be most satisfactory. Even my ‘stalled’ walking without a limp campaign.

During our conversation I also learned for the first time, by asking because I didn’t know, which of the two types of hip replacement I had received.

[Previously, whenever people I met asked which of the two types I was going to be having, I hadn’t got the faintest clue and didn’t want to ask anyone on the surgical team in case they thought I was being an idiot].

It appeared that I had endured was what was described as an ‘uncemented’ hip replacement.

In other words, instead of everything being kept in place with the aid of some sort of medical cement, they’d opted instead to place a half-‘ball’ receiver in my pelvis and then hollow out my thigh bone and then hammer-bash into it a length of piping coated with some sort of gel or agent that thereafter promoted the bone growth around it.

So that’s all right, then. At least I now know, in case anyone asks.

Finally, the kid confirmed my theory that the biggest ‘recovery’ issue with a hip wasn’t that of coming back from the operation at all. In fact, it was the process of learning to walk without a limp again, an entirely separate matter from the operation.

You first had to ‘un-learn’ how you had limp-walked whilst you had been living with the arthritis problem, as I had been doing for the best part of three years – and then you had to get the other sinews and muscle-memories (that you’d shut down in order to limp-walk as indicated) to come back again in order to get yourself walking without a limp once more.

The kid confirmed to me that this was a straightforward slog – no other way of doing it, no short cut was possible – and ‘hippers’ had no alternative but to get on with it.

In no time at all, it seemed, I was out in reception again. I asked the lady on the desk where I might leave my walking stick (I’d heard somewhere that the NHS losing millions of pounds per annum from people not returning them) and she said I could only return them to the hospital from which I’d received them. This took me an extra 20-mile round trip to accomplish, but – feeling buoyant after my consultation – I duly set off and did the necessary ‘good Samaritan’ job of returning my stick to whence it had come.

Job done!