Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

By the time I was moved back to CRX for my rehabilitation I had made a little breakthrough, discovering my own trick for fighting pain. At times when my medication was beginning to wear off, but there were still hours to wait until it was topped up, I found that by concentrating on my breathing I could get a certain amount of relief. The technique may have gone all the way back to my years of bed rest, in which case I was only dusting it off and putting it back into use.

The trick seemed to work differently from the medication. Instead of the pain going away, I went away from the pain. I was practising a sort of home-grown meditation. It was hardly surprising that my method wasn’t very sophisticated. Transcendental meditation hadn’t hit the headlines just yet — I dare say the Beatles were only just beginning to hear of it. But it was a lot better than nothing, however rough and ready my technique.

Only when I had been transferred to CRX for my rehabilitation, did I get an explanation of why the discomfort had disregarded the promised limits. How my body had failed to coöperate in its mauling as everyone had assured me it would.

CRX seemed to be where I ended up when no one else knew what to do with me. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I died — would I wake up in CRX on Ward One Thousand, with the tea trolley looming and Ansell doing her rounds, ready with another display of medical words I didn’t understand?

When I was installed in Men’s Surgical Ansell sat on the bed and came as close to an apology as an authoritarian ever can. ‘John,’ she said, ‘I’m not in the habit of lying to my patients — in fact in the past I’ve got into trouble for telling them too much of the truth. But in your case, though I didn’t lie, I discounted a crucial aspect of your case and seriously misled you as a consequence. My excuse can only be that you — my dear John — are so very unique.’ Ansell was teetering on the brink of tenderness, such a joyous novelty that it even interfered with my pedantic urge to point out that there can be no degrees of uniqueness. We’re each of us unique, or at least that’s the idea we all (identically) cling to.

There were considerate actions as well as kind words. Ansell scrounged up a set of linen sheets from somewhere, for old times’ sake. My wardmates made do with cotton, but flaxen whispers lulled this battered body to a threadbare sleep.

Ansell at her softest got through to me. My sense of natural justice, which had become badly inflamed and even infected in the aftermath of the operation, began to heal over at last.

Brimpton or Frilsham

The reason for my swearing, all my foulmouthed groggy screaming, was that from a surgical point of view I was such a special case. One of a kind. It’s possible to get just a little sick of being Mr Special.

There was something different about my history. It had been in my medical notes from my first week at CRX — in red ink, by rights — and still it had somehow been forgotten. ‘ The illness has raged ’, as Ansell had said the first time we met, and there was nothing to be done about that.

There had been no point in putting me on steroids so late in the day. In my whole life I had only been put on cortisone for two weeks. No time at all.

All this was on the record, yet had somehow been missed. People always worry about not noticing the small print, but sometimes it’s the large print that becomes invisible. It’s something that happens when you pay very close attention to a map, until your eye is calibrated to spot the tiniest hamlet with the silliest name (Brimpton, say, or Frilsham), and BERKSHIRE, or ENGLAND itself, looming hugely in widely spaced capitals, eludes you completely.

So we had surprises for each other in the operating theatre, the surgeon and I. He was expecting bones softened up by steroids. He felt entitled to that amount of coöperation from the raw materials of his art, before he went under the flesh to find my bones and save them from themselves. But softness was not what he got, anything but. My bones were hard-core.

I was expecting skilled intervention of a routine sort, a more sophisticated version of a householder changing a plug. It’s probably a bit of a fantasy, my idea of the standard operation from which mine deviated so sharply. I seriously doubt whether the pins ever actually slide into the bone-putty, with the surgeon hardly needing to bother with his drill — whistling tunefully as he instals the spare part into the machine disassembled on his bench. But my case, at the opposite end of the spectrum, was more abattoir than workshop. It was certainly no sewing circle.

My hip was so dense and so fused that the designated engineer couldn’t get any purchase on it. In the end he had to break the bone, in the only way he could think of. That was the surprise my body got in its sleep, the nightmare which made it wake up screaming. The surgeon sitting on my left hip to break it.

He didn’t perch gingerly on my hip, as you might mime sitting on a balloon in a party game, since the idea after all was to break it. He had to come slamming down. It must have been more like what happens when schoolboys misbehave in a playground they’re too old for. I don’t mean the ones who sprint to the swings to exploit the unlimited power of their teenaged bodies, making time stop as they pause at the highest point. I mean the ones who monopolise the seesaw, bucking and plunging wildly until the pivot groans, slamming themselves down onto the seat after being suspended so high above it that you can see blue sky beneath their uniform trousers. It must have been like that in the operating theatre at Wexham Park Hospital, Slough, until the pivot of my hip finally gave way beneath the grimly bouncing surgeon.

I could tell that Ansell was being sincere in her apologies. She took an interest in my diet, recommending wholemilk yoghurt to build me up. Calcium, I suppose, for healthy bones. She tried to get me to gain some weight, putting me on a course of anabolic steroids, making sure I understood that they weren’t the same sort of steroids that were prescribed for Still’s itself.

Cream of yoga

Yoghurt seemed a very exotic substance to me then, but I liked its grainy sourness from the start. Mum started making it rather than go to all the trouble of tracking it down — yoghurt was hard to find in the mid-1960s, at least in the environs of Bourne End, a town that was no great magnet for epicures. Making yoghurt was hardly a more conventional occupation than taking asses’-milk baths, come to that, but it didn’t take long for Mum to get the knack. She would cook the milk, reduce it through evaporation, add the live culture and then leave it in the oven on the lowest setting.

I acquired a real yen for yoghurt, partly because it seemed to me linked to yoga and to yogis, two things that fascinated me. It pleased me to think I was consuming Cream of Yoga in slow spoonfuls. False etymology can be very seductive, but it couldn’t help me to put on any weight, and Ansell continued to fret over me.

I don’t know how long it was supposed to take a normal case to rehabilitate after McKee pins, or even a normal case of Still’s. In my case it took a good six months — and that was just one hip. A fused joint with only a shred of tenuous muscle attached to it doesn’t come back from the dead so easily. We were dragging my hip out of the Stone Age and into the twentieth century.

In the short term (which actually lasted rather a long time) my new hip brought total immobility rather than walking power. I was back in the suffocating cocoon of bed rest, after all the trouble it had taken for me to pupate the last time.

Books were my life-raft — or books were the sea on which my life-raft bobbed. My reading lists got me through that time, both Mr Latham’s and Mrs Buchanan’s. I loved Pamela , and it’s gloriously long. I pretended to groan at the very idea of long books, but secretly I adored them. My impatience was put on. I was like the child on a journey who keeps on asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ but actually wants to be told, not ‘Nearly, darling’, nor ‘Pipe down you little pest!’, but ‘Nowhere near’. We’ve hardly started.