So, for those of you who haven’t already heard the saga live, so to speak, I am now part cyborg. My right hip joint has been replaced with a ceramic-coated metal ball and socket – X-rays will be duly scanned and uploaded.
I checked into the Mater Hospital in Crows Nest on Thursday afternoon, 28th January. Was late, of course, and as a result nearly missed dinner. Not a good start, especially as when dinner arrived it turned out to be a cheese and tomato sandwich and something steaming under a hot lid… beans and potatoes. And this place is eight hundred and something dollars a night, I thought. Hmph. That’s what you get for not giving the kitchen proper notice.
My surgeon came to see me and drew fat black arrows on the appropriate leg. Well, exactly – let’s avoid the unthinkable. He informed me, in response to my earlier request to be allowed to bring in a video documentarist, that although that wasn’t possible he’d arranged to move my surgery into the theatre that has a camera in the overhead light fitting, so I’d have my record of the action. He seemed as pleased with me as I was with him.
The following morning I was wheeled down to surgery, given a silly hat (the sort that makes your average shower cap look tailored) and had a few things stuck on me which would aid the monitoring process while I was under. Had a chat with the anaesthetist and decided to opt for a spinal injection. Apparently people get nervous about it but it sounded like a marginally better option for me. She put a little something into my cannula – first stage knockout drops. They wheeled me into theatre; the surgeon said hi and pointed out where the camera was. I felt fine at that point but was apparently already too dopey to wave.
I woke up in Recovery with the anaesthetist standing over me and the surgeon grinning beside her. He put my blue hospital file on the bed with me and said, “your DVD’s in there.” I was wheeled back up to my room where I discovered a general anaesthetic has little impact on your appetite. Soup, sandwiches, sleep. At 5pm: a modest but tasty three-course dinner, then more sleep. All this time, I’m lying on my back. A hospital bed is the coolest thing: you can raise and lower the whole bed, or just the back, or just the point under your knees, or you can tilt the whole thing – or any combination thereof. All by pushing buttons on a little device at your side. Though I couldn’t bend much in the middle, by dint of raising the back slightly, then tilting the whole bed a fair way, I could get a cup with a straw to my mouth without spilling anything. Perversely, I was having fun.
I also had PCA – Patient-Controlled Analgesic. A little button you can press which delivers a dash of morphine straight into your cannula… ☺ …After each dose it locks you out for five minutes, but even taking a dose every five minutes is safe. I don’t know how long the spinal block lasted, but I was only hitting the button every two hours or so. And I was perfectly happy. In fact, for the first few hours I felt downright vivacious – though if I look back through the texts I sent I wasn’t at my most coherent.
Sometime late in the evening, unsurprisingly, my back started to hurt. All it needed was a stretch I do without thinking many times a day, a simple spinal twist. When lying on your back, this is achieved by crossing one knee over the other leg, bringing the hips up onto one side and twisting the shoulders in opposition. No chance of that. I began to shift around in bed, trying to get my upper body round this way and that while not moving my lower half at all. For a long time I had no success, and the kink in my back got more and more uncomfortable. Around midnight they rolled me, which is a wondrous process. You get a nurse on one side and an orderly on the other, they put a pillow between your legs and tell you what to do with your arms and then they neatly heft your whole body onto its side without you moving a muscle. Doesn’t hurt a bit. Then the nurse wipes down your back with something to stop you getting bedsores and they roll you back down again. While I was on one side I got them to hold me there a moment while I got a proper, satisfactory spinal twist, turning my face and shoulders toward the mattress. No click, but a definite improvement. I did squirm around for a while more after that, trying to get rid of the back pain altogether. Then I gave up, and decided it was time to get some sleep.
But by then the pain in my hip was increasing. By early morning I was hitting the morphine button every twenty minutes or so, and using a little (entirely unnecessary) pride to keep it to not more than that. Maybe the spinal’s worn off, I thought. I don’t know what to expect; what could’ve gone wrong, lying here on my back? Around 6am they rolled me again, and this time the neat manoeuvre came with a moment of cold-sweat, white-knuckle agony. Something was certainly wrong, but I was too doped to understand, or to impress the nurse when I said shakily, “that didn’t hurt like that last night.”
But I ate my breakfast okay, and the nurses and I were only mildly concerned by the fact that my leg had rolled outward (a natural enough circumstance for a ballet dancer) and, try as I might, I couldn’t raise the muscle to make the kneecap face the ceiling. I got a bit nervous when they took away my PCA, but they gave me a nice strong tablet and promised more whenever I felt the need. At 10am I was given a cup of tea and a biscuit. I remember taking half an hour to finish them. At 11 I was due for a routine post-op X-ray.
They wheel you out in your bed, take you down in the lift, position you under the X-ray machine and it’s done. Because it was a Saturday, the X-ray was coming back up to my ward with me instead of through the normal weekday administrative channels. The dude from the X-ray booth came out and dropped the envelope in my lap. (No doubt he was a highly qualified medical technician but he’s now forever ‘the dude’, due to his bandanna and his droll, low-key attitude.) “Been moving around a bit, have you?” he asked me. “No,” I vowed in surprise, confused by the idea of getting up and walking. “I’ve been on my back all the time.”
“Well,” he drawled, classically laconic, shaking his head slightly, “I think you might have a bit of a dislocation there.” I pulled the X-ray out of the envelope and looked at it… Oh. My. God. There was the new prosthesis, plain for the most inexpert viewer to see, but the ball was a good four centimetres from where it should’ve been, right out of the cup and up beside it. Oops. I began to giggle. Morphine makes light of everything.
We rolled back up to the ward where I waved the X-ray at them cheerfully saying, “bad news!” As the orderly repositioned my bed I could hear them out at the nurses’ station, going nuts over the X-ray. They called my surgeon, who arrived in remarkably short time and showed absolutely no ill feeling about me complicating what was presumably his day off. “If I just take your leg like this and” – I winced audibly – “no, we’re going to have to put you under. When did you last eat? Ten o’clock? We’ll book surgery for two.” He disappeared and a nurse gave me a morphine injection in the thigh. I slept, and woke at about twenty to two. In pain. But, I thought, I’ll shortly be under general anaesthetic, so that’ll do. The nurse came back, all apologetic. “There’s a woman with twins has to have a caesar – you’ve been bumped to three thirty.”
“In that case,” I said immediately, “I’ll have another shot.” They put me back in the arms of Morpheus until I was wheeled back to theatre. A droll Irish surgeon came to chat with me while mine was prepping, and apologised for his twins taking my spot. We bantered back and forth until my anaesthetist (#2) arrived and said he’d put me out for “between two and twenty minutes”. The procedure itself took, presumably, only seconds.
Since then I’ve been healing like a champion. In hospital-speak, the day of the surgery is Day Zero, so the clicking back in or ‘closed reduction’ as they called it was on Day 1. Day 2, I think (it’s a bit of a blur) they took the catheter out and I hobbled to the bathroom and back on a frame. I also ‘sat out’ – spent some time out of bed on a chair. Day 3 I swapped the frame for calliper-type crutches and almost immediately ditched one of those to get about on just the one. Day 4 I swapped that for a walking stick. Day 5 they said I could go home if I wanted, but given I’d lost a day with the dislocation I elected to stay one more. My private health insurance doesn’t cover me for outpatient rehab so I wanted to be as stable as possible before leaving. By my last night I’d outstripped the physios’ requirements by so much I’d become a star patient. But of course.
And how’s this? I had only enough private health cover for my choice of doctor in a public hospital, but my choice of doctor doesn’t operate in a public hospital, so I was paying a gap of several thousand dollars, much of which was the cost of a bed at the Mater. But on my final morning as I waited to be released, I was visited by someone senior from Accounts (I think) who wanted to let me know that because I’d dislocated – treatment for which constituted a different kind of procedure with a different level of cover – it appeared, subject to confirmation, that my health fund would cover all my hospital costs from dislocation to release. She came up to let me know because, having paid on admission, I was likely to get a sizeable refund check from the hospital, with not much explanation. I felt like I was having a particularly good birthday.
I’m staying with a friend for the first two weeks out of hospital. Alison’s apartment is quiet, airy and simply furnished; very restful, and Alison, who works 9-5, is a remarkably good-hearted and eminently sensible person. She likes to cook and – like most people – would rather cook for two than one. She seems to enjoy having me here and I’m loving being here. I spend most of each day reading, writing or sleeping – especially at first I slept for several hours each day, as well as all night. My body was healing at a phenomenal rate and really didn’t have much energy for anything else. I still sleep a lot, but I’m trying to use these weeks of recuperation time to knock out a draft of a novel. I’m also about halfway through Geoffrey Robertson’s Crimes Against Humanity, a 4cm-thick tome about the development of human rights law, tiny print but actually very readable. It’s nice to have the time for it.
Day 8 from the surgery was a Saturday, and we were invited to a party at Area 51 (our friends’ notorious party house). I promised to make an appearance, but when the time came I was party-ready in a truly shameless way. I took my stick for the sake of caution and fatigue, but I was walking without. I wore long pants to hide my compulsory knee-high compression stockings – but I lost track of how many times I unzipped them to show my dressings. I’d brought the dislocation X-ray because it’s a doozy and was bound to reap applause. I lasted a good seven hours partying – including, ahem, a few minutes on the dance floor. Believe it or not, that time was anything but a careless indulgence: I had the room to myself with Pablo on DJ duty (always magic) and I started with my hands on the back of a chair, doing slow stretching and reps of my hospital exercises. Soon I could feel the joint properly for the first time. That’s when I had a little bop. Just because I could. Then I stopped before I did something stupid. But hallelujah.
Alison, who has watched me improve day by day, says I’m a legend. I like that. Eugene has also been supportive, driving me to and from the hospital and running the odd errand. The staff of the Mater deserve acknowledgement, because they were wonderful, and my surgeon Michael O’Sullivan did an absolutely brilliant, textbook-precise job: I had very little bleeding, almost no bruising, and the way he cut in seems to have done minimal damage to the surrounding musculature. Fabulous work.
I have to tell you: the joint functions pretty much like the real thing, and a whole lot better than my old arthritic one. But it doesn’t feel like the real thing – for one thing, the ball rotates within the socket with an uncanny smoothness. An uncannily frictionless, hard smoothness. I can feel – not the joint itself, obviously, because it has no nerves – but the movement of the joint, which is sensed by, I suppose, the various muscles and other tissue around it and connected to the bone either side of it. And it feels… not organic. The tiny, all-important degree of give in an organic joint – the layer of cartilage, the various fibrous attachments, the softness of bone relative to metal – is not there, nor the tiny softening asymmetricalities of things made by nature. Part of me is now machine-made. Machine-like. It’s likely I’ll have to get the other hip done in a few years; I wonder how many parts I’ll have replaced by the time I die. They’ll have to take me to pieces for recycling.
