Joint Ventures

Hello, dear reader!

Echoes. Aren’t they fascinating?

I’m not talking about the way your voice comes back at you from some deep well or cavern wall. No, that's not the kind of echo (echo, echo, echo, cho, cho, o) I mean at all. What I’m talking about is echoes through time.

You see, two weekends ago, while Tina, my ever-essential wife and I were living it up in Exotic Alfreton (and sumptuous Swanwick) my sainted mother was undergoing an operation to fit a new knee.

Im-Patient
She’s alright, is the old dear. Understandably sore, and no doubt being driven up the wall by her forced inaction and the well-meaning but not to specification efforts of my dad to fill the void of housework and shopping left in her stead, but, generally speaking, on the mend. I phoned her just the other night, and during the conversation memories of my own bout of forced inactivity were bounced around.

I’ve written about it before, although that was some time ago, but what I’m alluding to is the operation I underwent some thirty three years ago, at the ripe old age of seventeen, when the good old NHS rebuilt my left hip.

This was a little more convoluted than a simple (??) hip replacement. I was growing, and thanks to my Spina Bifida that growth had happened imperfectly. Something that caused my hip to dislocate at random times, often while I was upright, once or twice when I was half way up a flight of stairs. It was not a pleasant situation.

Staggering!
I was more ambulatory back in those days, a staggerer of ungainly staggers, who only used his wheelchair for long distances or nights out on the town (alcohol and a natural unsteadiness are not the happiest of bedfellows) but by the time the surgeons had reshaped the ball and socket of the hip joint, and tightened, tautened, and jigged about with, the tendons, muscles and other bits and bobs that kept the one securely in the other, I was a wonkier man, with one leg a good couple of inches shorter than the other .

I was also a lot less mobile.

The operation was a long one, or so I’m told. I was, as is recommended, asleep at the time. I know I woke as groggy as I’d ever done from any other operation, though, with my mouth bone dry, claggy, and filled with the wonderfully pervasive taste of anaesthetic. I was also half encased in plaster of paris. A pot that extended from waist all the way down my left leg and half way down my right with a length of broom handle separating the two in a slightly uncomfortable and extremely undignified way.

And that was my life for the next seven months.

All Bad
I still have some fond memories of that long stretch of pain and boredom. I remember the late night Hammer horror marathons with Darren, the guy in the next bed (he’d crashed his motor scooter and was in double traction for a good chunk of the time I was there). I remember being included in the night staff’s burger runs. I remember the Sister who baked me a lasagne and who I named our dog, Bonnie after. It wasn’t all bad.

But a lot of it was. The changing of the pot. The moving of joints that had seized up like concrete sending a jolt of pain through me like my leg had been slowly broken. The tears when I was told I couldn’t go home yet. The long rehabilitation in a facility mainly populated by stroke patients, half of whom were struck dumb by their malady and all of whom were a good thirty years older than me. Most of all, I remember being let out to celebrate my eighteenth birthday, and how horrible it was to have to return the same night.

The ordeal, in total, lasted just over nine months, Seven of which I spent in the hip spiker, and the remaining two comprising painful and exhausting rehabilitation. It wasn’t all bad, but it certainly wasn’t all good, either.

Healing Time
Which brings me full circle. My mum, with her shiny new knee, was kicked out of hospital after just one weekend. A miracle of modern science. There’s been pain, no doubt. Pain, discomfort, a hell of a lot of bruising, but having had surgery on Saturday, she was home by Monday night. I have to wonder, if my operation were to take place today, would I be the same? Would I be anywhere near? Is it possible my recovery might have been measured in days, or even weeks rather than months?

Not that I’m begrudging anyone the improvements made in the field. That’s the way life works. It’s the way it should be. Anything we, as a generation, or as individuals, suffered through should be that much easier for the ones to come. We might bemoan how kids have it easy these days, but they should. Everything we’ve gone through; everything advancement, everything we leave behind, should make it easier. It’s what life is for.

Don’t know they’re born, eh?

Until next time.

#

Hey, there! If you enjoyed reading any of the above, why not take a look at some of my published work? Below you’ll find links to a number of short stories I’m lucky enough to have included in anthologies. I’d love to know what you think.


New Tales Of Old


Death Ship


Pestilence: Drabbles 1


Reaperman: Drabbles 3


The Musketeers Vs Cthulhu


Eldritch Investigations