Wednesday 11 October 2017

Process of ageing

It's my birthday!

No longer, admittedly, the occasion for celebration and excitement that it once was.  In fact I can only once remember when I was at Junior school my mother offering to do me a birthday party, when she gave me the chance of having a party or an extra-special (i.e. expensive) present, and I somewhat anti-socially chose the present!  Needless to say I've long since forgotten what it was.

One thing I do remember, doing a bit of reminiscing, is how apprehensive we all all were back in the year 2000 being at the mercy of the so-called 'millennium bug'.  Would it mark the end of life as we knew it?  It didn't: life carried on just the same despite all the prophets of doom.

I don't know about anyone else, but the last seventeen years haven't been particularly eventful ones for me, not compared, say, to the first seventeen years of my life.  I survived my childhood, and free of the pervasive creeping influence of the nanny-state, those years were by and large happy, carefree ones - although I'm pretty sure I didn't think so at the time.  On the other hand despite the intrinsic curiosity value I certainly wouldn't want to back and relive them, or at least certainly not in a modern setting.  There's a well-known natural tendency to remember things from long ago as being better than they actually were, of course.

And what of the last seventeen?  They've been marked by the major event of leaving work and while I'm tempted to say that my retirement hasn't been anything like I thought it was going to be, I don't honestly think I'd given that much thought to what it was going to be like.  I've always tended to go for the make-it-up-as-you-go-along  approach.

One thing which has marked the last 17 years was my decision in the year 2000 to start an online diary, of which this this blog is the latest incarnation.  I've only very occasionally trawled back to see what I was thinking about and writing about - and most of it I suspect was fairly trivial.  But it is/was an insight into how I was feeling at the time, and I've never deleted or altered anything.  And while I don't blog as frequently or consistently as I did when I first started, I keep it going because I want to.  It's just for me, and not, God forbid, for future generations of schoolboys à la Pepys!   

Friday 6 October 2017

All looking good

Seven weeks on from my hip replacements, I went to the Hospital this morning to get them checked over.  The physio looked at the scars, got me to do a few test exercises, and then invited me to have a look at my X-Rays.  I'm not really a connoisseur of X-Rays, but the 'before' ones definitely looked to me like a mass of solid bone which had seized up virtually solid, in contrast to the one they took the following day, with the metal joints showing up just like they do in a medical textbook.  What also showed up quite clearly and distinctly, being metal, were my PA and foreskin piercings!

Being the exhibitionist that I am, I couldn't resist saying, "Ooh look..." simply because it hadn't occurred to me they would be visible, but how you could take an X-Ray of the pelvic area without something like that showing visibly is of course almost impossible if you think about it.  Perhaps a bit strange that nobody wondered what they were, but then again I daresay radiographers at least must have seen them before.

I asked how long it would be before I could bend and tie my bootlaces myself, and he said it was just a matter of time and practice, and that it was as much a muscular exercise as anything else.

Pleased as Punch, I left my crutches behind for use of the next patient, and made my way home on the bus, no longer having to sit in the seats at the front specially reserved for those with 'impaired mobility'.  Get as much exercise as you can, he'd said, so I even toyed briefly with the idea of getting another dog. 

Sunday 24 September 2017

And back for more!

Part One - last year...
Well, I survived the Hernia repair, and looking back on it now, and re-reading what I wrote in anticipation I have to say I worried totally unnecessarily: everything was fine.  The only hitch was that the surgeon couldn't do the laproscopy which he'd planned - he told me afterwards that when he put the little camera in, everything was so tightly compacted he couldn't see what he was doing and so had to go for for an open mesh job instead.

I had a slight panic a couple of days after the operation when an accumulation of fluid made my poor little boy equipment swell up to elephantine proportions, completely burying my PA and foreskin rings under a massive balloon.  I'd never seen anything like it and sat there wondering what was going to happen if it sealed up the urethra underneath this coccoon-like thing, blocking my ability to pee.  Fortunately I discovered it didn't, and in a couple of days it had subsided as suddenly as it had come: if only someone had forewarned me, as I found out afterwards it's not that uncommon as a side-effect.

The waterproof dressings came off after about twelve days, exposing two rows of stitches which were actually rows of metal staples called 'clips', looking a bit like teeth braces.  I wish now I'd taken a photo: thinking back to my body piercing days, my mates would surely have been insanely jealous of this pair of awesome metal contraptions adorning my pubic area!  But they had to come out, and a year on, I just have two faint scars as little souvenirs of it all.

Part two - this year...
But while that problem had been solved, another had developed in its place.  I was experiencing very troublesome arthritis in my hip joints culminating in my not being able to sit down to lace my boots up or pick anything up of the floor, and more significantly forcing me to give up my fortnightly trips to my Italian classes.  I was by this time walking painfully (or more accurately, hobbling) with the aid of a stick, and people who knew me were commenting on how much difficulty I was having: I was petrified of losing my balance and having a fall.  I really couldn't face the prospect of having to spend the rest of my life indoors, and so went on the waiting list for a hip replacement.  Despite hearing that something almost akin to rationing was in force in the NHS, I in fact got an appointment surprisingly quickly.  I was gobsmacked when the surgeon asked me, unusually, if I'd like to have both hips done at the same time, which I hadn't thought was actually technically possible, but I replied straightaway: "Yeah, I'd be up for that".

And so that's what I had done.  All pretty hardcore: everyone I've told about it has been amazed!  But it's gone like a dream and five weeks later I've almost dispensed with the crutches and with just a few residual aches (and plenty of rest), I'm otherwise recovering fast and will soon be up and running.

A very nice touch, incidentally, was the chance to pay for a private room for the duration of my hospital stay.  With a price tag of several grand, there's no way I could've afforded to have the whole operation done privately - and fortunately I didn't need to.  But it was a nice 'extra' touch of individual care and the staff couldn't have been more attentive - just like staying in a hotel, in fact.  So all in all,,props to Warwick Hospital for a grand job!