Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Discreet off-stage cough

I must have read the sentence, ‘He walked with difficulty, as his joints and knees were affected by acute rheumatism’, and yet felt no particular quickening of interest. What else was I looking for, if not a guru with arthritis? The fit was incredibly close, yet I missed it. It was as if I was being protected by a sort of lightning conductor, from premature contact with energy of a high order. I put the book aside unaffected, at least on the surface. In this way a leading player in my life gave notice of his existence with a discreet off-stage cough, waiting in the wings, years before he made his entrance proper.

People value what they pay for. The things they get for free, such as a national health service, tend to be under-appreciated. I wasn’t going to make that mistake. Morale is important. I was deeply in debt to a system which was the envy of the world, and I didn’t want anyone to imagine they had inserted a metal hip into an ingrate. As soon as I decently could, as soon as there was a chance of being believed, I had been saying how pleased I was with the operation. Despite everything I passed congratulations on to the surgeon who had done the work at Wexham Park — Mr Arden — saying how marvellous it was to have a hip that worked, a hip that didn’t just sit there. Modern medical science was wonderful, just wonderful. I was a new person, with my new hip! Hip hip hurray!

But maybe one Hip hurray! was celebration enough. When a little time had gone by, I started mentioning that of course the other hip, the one that hadn’t been replaced, had never been as bad as the one that had. Which was true, but all the same I was working up to something in my naïvely devious way. It was rather a waste of money — of people’s taxes, when you came right down to it — to operate on the other hip, when really I was fine now.

Then Ansell came and sat on my bed and routed my little scheme. She said, ‘John, you do know that you’re going to have to have the other operation, don’t you?’ A doctor sitting on a bed in Men’s Surgical didn’t mean you were dying, as it had when I was on the children’s wards, but it wasn’t exactly relaxing. I was in for some sort of scolding.

I tried to bluster, but blustering doesn’t really work from a horizontal position. It helps if you can loom. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was thinking that maybe I’m all right the way I am now.’ I was being partly truthful. There’s nothing like having a sore new hip that has to be coaxed into the slightest movement to make you fall in love with the good old fixed one. Rigid, dependable, everything a hip should be. ‘The physios have been super, and I can do such a lot more now than I ever could. I can’t help feeling that there are other patients who have much more to gain from the operation than I do.’

Ansell wasn’t fooled for a moment. ‘And I don’t suppose this is about the pain, is it? The pain that I said you wouldn’t have, and turned out to be so severe?’

I didn’t have the strength of character to deny it outright, so I just put my head on one side by a few degrees and raised my eyebrows, as if I was considering something that had never occurred to me before.

‘Next time at least you’ll know what you’re in for. And I couldn’t in all conscience encourage you to stop now. You’ve had half the pain already, but you haven’t had more than a tenth of the mobility that we can give you with two good hips.’

Hip honeymoon

I gave it a good thinking-over. The new hip worked extremely well. The increase in my ability to live up to my biped pretensions was tremendous. But I wasn’t convinced that a second operation would bring about a second transformation. It seemed to suit my gait to have one hip fixed and the other mobile. Would I really be able to manage without a stick after a second operation? Somehow I couldn’t imagine a future of walking without aids of any kind, and a stick was a relatively discreet accessory. It could be tucked tidily away when it wasn’t needed. I was having a hip honeymoon now, certainly, but it wouldn’t last for ever. Sooner or later I’d just have to get on with things, but would a second operation really bring me the life I dreamed of?

I tried to visualise my walking style with two mobile hips. Perhaps my body would go bendy in the middle, if I didn’t have the muscle strength to brace myself and hold myself steady in the proper posture. Then I’d be sorry that I’d said yes to the second operation.

After all, who was the one who knew most about the management of this body? I was so sure it was me, when apparently it was the ones who walked around with all their parts well-formed and smoothly functioning. They knew more about the subject than I could ever hope to. I rehearsed my objections to Mum, who said I must take it up with Dr Ansell. Ansell just said, ‘We can’t have you going through life without being able to walk correctly!’ So overall the argument of ‘it just isn’t on’ won the day, despite not being an argument. I voiced my worry about ‘going all bendy in the middle’ and was told that although that might be the case for a few days, my muscles would soon strengthen up and I’d wonder at my silly doubts. I still wasn’t convinced and asked, ‘What if I really can’t manage? Can’t I at least try life with one hip and see how I get on? I feel so well set up …’

Dr Ansell had the grace to consult Mr Arden on this point. The message relayed back from him was that if I really didn’t get on with a mobile right hip, he could do another operation to set things permanently, ‘at any angle you want’.

Somehow I knew that the right hip wouldn’t be such a success, and I told Ansell so. ‘Don’t be silly, John,’ she said. ‘What makes you think you know better than the surgeon? You’re always saying he did a good job on the left hip.’ Once the burning spiders had gone to sleep, that is.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just feel it in my bones.’ Then Ansell looked at me with a very strange expression, as if after all this time she still didn’t know what to make of me.

Anyway, that was me dished and dashed. In all honesty I couldn’t go against the doctor who’d done so much for me. I had to bite the bullet. One day soon I would have to go to sleep in a hospital, knowing that I would wake up feeling like a piece of playground equipment that has been methodically vandalised by people who should know better, trained health-service professionals. Grown-ups. Perhaps this time the anæsthetist would get in on the act. Let everyone have a go, the porter, the lady from the canteen, the whole bang lot. Last one on John’s hip’s a sissy.

Only one thing made me submit to a second assault, and it wasn’t actually reverence for Ansell. I had gone against her in the past, when she had devised walking aids for me that I refused outright, and I could do it again. But until the second hip was done I wouldn’t be able to adopt anything close to a conventional sitting posture. I wasn’t worried about taking tea with the Queen. I would rely on her, when the time came, to put me at my ease — isn’t that her job? But with two working hips, even in the event that one worked less well than the other — as I so confidently anticipated — learning to drive came a lot nearer. Still a long shot but not a flat impossibility.

I quite see the comedy of someone who had always resisted mechanistic accounts of the universe deciding that his life wasn’t complete without a car. On the other hand, if I didn’t grab the steering wheel with both hands, the joke would be on me for all time. I’d never be able to take charge of my own life. If I didn’t make it to the driver’s seat then I would never be more than a passenger, dependent on the good will of others. A finite quality, as I had already understood. The people who looked after me had limited stocks of patience, and for all I knew they were more forbearing than most. I had never experienced what it was to carry a burden — and that was the whole point. My only experience of burdens was of being one, and I couldn’t claim to have unlimited patience either, in that rôle.