The next stage

Yesterday – five weeks and counting after my hip replacement operation – I went for my first physio session. Regular followers may recall that I only reached this stage because a couple of weeks ago, puzzled that I hadn’t already been called for physio as I understood would be the case, I rang my GP and asked what the score was.

He said that the hospital should have arranged it, so I rang the hospital 24/7 ‘hip helpline’ and was told they couldn’t understand why my physio hadn’t been arranged yet because they’d sent my details on to my local unit a fortnight previously. When I then rang said unit it became apparent they’d never received my details and asked me to chase the hospital to send them. This I did. As a direct result – my appointment yesterday.

I gave up taking my painkiller and other meds (hitherto taken four times a day) last week, but I still cannot walk properly without a stick. Or, to be more precise about it, I can walk without a stick but only with a gait that would make a matelot in a Force Eight gale, or alternatively an ancient bow-legged horse rider, proud.

All the above I made clear to my physio, who took notes and asked a few other questions before examining me.

I had made due preparation for this by in advance donning vivid pink lycra gym shorts – the better for the sensitivity of my physio (especially if she had a young female) if say I had been required to put my legs over the back of my head or something similar thereby (had I say been wearing just a pair of boxers) inadvertently exposing him or her to the full majesty of a sixty-something’s ‘meat & two veg’ in the process. No point in frightening the horses, I figured, especially first thing in the morning before they’d even had the chance to consume their customary coffee and bacon roll.

It was thus clad – together with my dark green DVT (deep vein thrombosis)-preventing green socks – that I emerged from the curtains to my cubicle – that hitherto had protected my modesty and indeed confidentiality of my conversation – into the main room which was dominated by a pair of groin-level parallel bars of the sort that I had last seen at the Olympics gymnastics but also remembered from the movie Reach for The Sky in which Kenneth More gave a memorable performance as Douglas Bader, who lost both his legs in a flying accident and yet still ended up being a famous and sometimes controversial WW2 flying ace.

Having walked up and down the room under the gaze of my medic, I was then taken back to my cubicle for further ‘try out’ exercises designed for him to gauge my current flexibility as reached by having been doing the few basic exercises that my ‘discharge pamphlet’ had strongly suggested should be done twice a day.

By stating ‘should have been doing’ I should perhaps expand and say that – for the past fortnight – I had almost completely neglected them, on the basis of boredom and the sense that there’s a limit to how much ‘clenching your buttocks’ I could do without feeling a complete idiot. Not that I confessed my failure to do my exercises to him, you understand – I was hoping that, by sheer force of core personal strength, I would be able to ‘kid’ him otherwise.

Anyway, soon came the verdict.

I was pretty much ‘on course’. The reason that I was frustrated at not being ‘further down the line’ was purely that – had I begun my physio two weeks previously, as should have happened but for the administrative cock-up – by now I would probably have been able to discard my stick.

Within minutes he had given me four new (more strenuous and advanced) physio exercises to do at least once a day, if not twice, and then pushed me out into the wide and wonderful world.

I’m going to go back in about a fortnight for another assessment to see how I’m getting on. I didn’t have too good a start. Having vowed to do my first set of these new exercises last night – possibly even after a trek to the gym, which the physio had told me was now perfectly okay, even a bit of swimming – feeling somewhat weary at all the excitement, I had a longish mid-afternoon snooze, did some work and then made myself an evening meal before going to bed on the stroke of 7.30pm.

The physio campaign can begin today … possibly …