There will be no mention of blood or other squeamish things in this story about my summer spent in hospital, mainly because I might frighten myself and have to lie down again. There are two kinds of patients: either you are the kind of person who will want to know all about the process of hip replacement, and who will read the explanatory booklet carefully, or else you are the sort who knows nothing about it because you would feel lightheadedness coming on by the very magnitude of what has to be done.
You will either proudly show your scar to everyone or not even look at it yourself. Mercifully, you will be glad to know, I am in the latter category. I don't know how they got the bad bits out or the good bits in and, considering the number of things we do need to know in this life, I feel totally justified in not inquiring. And it's not that I am brave. I'm a jelly of fear almost all the time, about everything.
Well, I left you in mid-July with a long, sad tale about not getting a wink of sleep. It was this that drove me to desperate remedies. I had been told I was not a likely candidate for hip replacement, what with being very fat and having bones that weren't the best, so I had more or less given up on it.
But the no sleep thing was something else. Pain and discomfort can be coped with somehow, and I had sort of got out of the habit of walking anywhere. But I was afraid I was going to lose my marbles unless I got a night's sleep.
I was never a person who went on diets, or cared about diets. And as I never minded what shape other people were if they were nice, I presumed, and still presume, that most people don't mind what shape I am. So, I didn't have any history of losing a little weight and then putting it all back on like most people seem to have. Diets were, to me, something like Formula One racing or nose-piercing that I hoped I wouldn't really have to have anything to do with.
But then I was down to an hour's sleep a night and the future didn't look at all good. So I went back to the surgeon.
The surgeon said that it was a matter of losing five stone.
So I did.
But please relax. This is not a Before and After story. I am still a very large woman. This is not the history of a makeover. There will be no Handy Hints, no Nigel Lawson-style diet books, no heart-rending pleas to other people to do the same thing.
For a start, I was very, very happy when hugely fat and I am still very, very happy when somewhat less fat. And that's all it is. Also, my diet, which was something akin to a hunger strike, was not anything that any responsible human being could recommend to another. I ate a crispbread for breakfast with a pear, another crispbread for lunch with a cup of Bovril, and a third for dinner with a potato and a spoon of yoghurt. I didn't go out much - I was too weak, really, and sleepless and lame, but when I did go out I used to tell friends and people in restaurants the truth, and they were very helpful.
"Don't go near Maeve with that sweet trolley," I heard one waitress say to another. "The poor woman's meant to be getting a new hip and it will be our fault if she doesn't." I've always believed you should make other people responsible for your little weaknesses.
I had to say goodbye to a long, happy and fuzzy relationship with Chardonnay. This was not easy, but I discovered two blinding glimpses into the obvious which may help anyone having to face the same thing. The worst part about going out for an evening without a glass of wine is actually the anticipation of it - once you get there, you more or less forget it. Truthfully. And the other amazing fact is that it's much easier for people like me who aren't great at moderation to have no wine than to have one glass.
So once a month I would have what I termed an Evening With Wine for myself. This Evening With Wine has taken varying forms. Sometimes it has involved falling asleep after two glasses - which was very bad value indeed. Once it involved falling out of my bed in Chicago - which was even worse. But still, as a scheme it has its advantages and I look forward to this evening hugely for about 30 days. It's not at all as nice as drinking every night but it's much, much nicer than never drinking at all.
Right. So on this ludicrous diet the weight was lost and in I went to hospital. Brave as a lion, I lay there sleepless the night before the operation and thought about how nice it would be to have no pain. And I sat in the dark and thought how strange it is that you could feel as if there was a knife sticking into you and yet other people were inclined to say "Oh, it's only arthritis", as if you were making a production out of a head cold instead of weeping with sympathy as they would over anyone with a real knife sticking into them. I resolved that if I survived it I would raise more money for the Arthritis Foundation for research and for people not to have wait for months to get replacements.
As the hours passed, somehow my confidence got less, and I wondered was this the right thing to do at all and maybe it might be very dangerous and unwise and, in fact, contra-indicated. Perhaps I had been too strong in my complaints and whinges and more or less forced the surgeon's hand?
And as the dawn came into the room I decided I would go home - put it off for a few years, anyway. I rehearsed what I would say as an explanation for my sudden departure, but when the army of nurses came in to paint my hip and get the show on the road somehow the thought of trying to escape was more frightening than going ahead with it.
My bed went down with me in the lift. I lay there glumly, my heart beating with fear. Why was I doing this? It was only pain. And sleeplessness. And not being able to walk to the door.
Maybe I was just run down. What I needed was a bit of food and drink like an ordinary person. I made a small move as if to leave the bed and the lift. A nurse kindly patted me on the hand, and I stayed where I was.
In the operating theatre the surgeon and anaesthetist greeted me pleasantly. This is their work, this is what they do every day, I told myself. Some people do this; other people write books, it is how the world goes on. With a nightmarish grin on my face, I forced myself to believe in what I was doing. "I'm going to hand it all over to you now," I told them generously.
It was very hard to concentrate as I said this because at the same time I was looking around wildly, wondering was there anything I could grab to use as a stick and maybe I could leap from the bed and run out of the theatre in my hospital gown out onto the road where I would hobble towards Dalkey.
They told me I had taken a wise decision in leaving it to them, relieved possibly that I hadn't asked for the tools to operate on my own hip in front of them.
I wasn't given a full anaesthetic, not the out-like-a-light job that has you unconscious. It was more like an epidural, which means that technically you are awake for it all. It's not something you'd want to think too much about if you are an escapist, so I thought about it not at all.
But you must get an awful lot of sedation, all the same, because I don't remember anything except this sound of building and hammering from next door and apparently I said cheerfully that it was a sign of a healthy economy when there was so much building going on and they all agreed with me rather than telling me that it was actually my own hip that was being hammered.
And then there was a short period spent in the Intensive Care Unit, which I thought was my own bedroom and was mildly interested to know why there was a man in the next bed. But I am glad to report that I appear to have been tolerant and not territorial about it all.
And then the really magic news, the bit that nobody can tell you about because you don't believe it's possible. The pain was gone. And it stays gone.
I was so pleased with this that I didn't notice the sharp disapproval of those who told me that my blood was in desperate shape from the hopeless diet I had been following. And I didn't mind when I was told that because my poor old bones had been so ulcerated and I was still very heavy I couldn't walk for three weeks. I was delighted not to have to walk. I lay back in a new world of pain-free happiness where I slept eight hours every night and watched television all day.
And every day I got great cheering cards and letters from friends and strangers and people who had been through the same thing telling glorious tales. One woman wrote that the end of pain was as if someone has turned off a tap - and that's the best description I have heard so far.
And as I was just settling down to this life of total bed rest, it was decided that I must walk again, something I had forgotten all about. The four people who were operated on the same day as I was were long gone home - they used to march past my room on Zimmer frames, then crutches and then off they went to convalesce. But I wasn't jealous. Not being one of nature's athletes, I was in no hurry to walk.
But walk I did, with terrifying instructions about how to get out of bed without dislocating this hip that had been put in with such care. (It was never referred to as my hip, but always by the name of the surgeon, it was his hip and I must be careful of it - as if he had lent it to me). All around the place there were patients remembering to ease their surgeon's hip gently towards the edge of the bed before trying to stand, and reaching for their little wedge cushions before daring to allow their surgeon's hip to sit down anywhere.
Physiotherapists - mistaking me possibly for some Olympic athletics competitor - suggested ludicrous programmes of exercise. I was quite appalled with how much walking ordinary people are meant to do in real life. I learned with displeasure that I walk with my bottom sticking out behind me. I used to walk so little before that this was never noticed.
I discovered with great pleasure that I had grown four inches in the hospital by being able to stand up properly so I was now able to look down and pat the heads of all those who had been so good to me, but who had seemed much taller when I went in there first.
I was there for six and a half weeks, including convalescence. I never met a person I didn't like and I met a huge number whom I will never forget, kind people with endless patience and tolerance and humour. People who washed me and fed me and helped me when I got stuck getting out of wheelchairs or on to X-ray tables. People who managed to get blood out of and into difficult veins, and who picked up the things I kept dropping and couldn't bend down to retrieve because of the borrowed hip.
And there were the physiotherapists who believed I could straighten up when I said my back was permanently curved like that and why couldn't they just let me get on with it.
And I suppose I did become sort of institutionalised, because on the last night I wondered who would get my room when I was gone. I got tearful then, and hoped that whoever it was would have as good a result as I had and no clots and no strokes and actually no memory of any real discomfort at all. I resolved to go around the country encouraging those who were timid about the operation, telling them about all the hobbling folk I had met in the corridors, all of us beaming with the amazement of having no pain.
Another reason I didn't like leaving the hospital was because there were still some aspects of peoples' love lives there that I hadn't yet fully sorted out.
And when I came home Gordon had a big bunch of balloons to greet me because he remembered who I was, which was much more than can be said of the two deeply loved cats, who didn't recognise me at all and resented me because I was taking up too much of the bed.
The borrowed hip demands that great quantities of nice, pleasant, comfortable weight are not allowed to gather again, so there's no prospect of jolly-elbows-on-the-table time. The desperate unhealthy diet that I had been on has been replaced with another fairly unpleasant one, but this time it includes some protein, vegetables, fruit and a minuscule portion of chicken, meat and fish.
I tried to argue that honestly, like drink, it was easier to eat nothing at all than to have these Lilliputian portions. I'd prefer never to look at cheese again in my life than to have 20 grams a day. But they told me to grow up and stop talking nonsense - so that seems to be that.
And every day I have to walk for 25 or 30 minutes. I had no idea how much I hated walking until this new enforced regime. My only hope of keeping any kind of relationship alive is to walk alone, because I hiss and snarl all the time and no fellow walker would ever want to see me again. It hurts a bit - not much, but a bit - and it's tiring and it's boring and a great achy strain on the arm that has a stick.
I don't know where this business about filling your lungs with air and enjoying it all comes from. I've tried walking on the Vico Road looking at the sea, walking in Wicklow in a field and I've tried going round the roads near me and peering into my neighbours' houses. I've tried walking along the main street in Dalkey hoping I'd meet lots of people I knew so that I could stop and lean on parked cars and chat. But I've been "her indoors" for so long I don't know anyone any more and I have to bang on the windows of shops to ask people to come out and distract me.
I was in London last week and I had forgotten that this Purgatory has to go on no matter where you are: my friends started telling me all about lovely places to walk like Holland Park, but I hated the sound of it and took the bus to Harrods instead, where I walked for half an hour. I didn't buy anything because I couldn't carry parcels on account of the stick. It wasn't too bad though because I could keep stopping, and lean on counters and get sprays of perfume or lessons in flying paper airplanes. (An over-healthy person dared to say to me that walking didn't count when it was on carpets. The overhealthy person got a very withering reply).
I get no exhilaration from walking at all. Will I get to like it, ever?
Please tell me. I'd honestly love some hints. Not from enthusiastic walking people but from bad walkers - people who much prefer sitting down. It's so long since I've been out I'm a bit unsure about it, and then again I'm so bad-tempered when I'm walking I'd be afraid of bursting into tears if anyone said a cross word to me.
I'll try anything. It's not that I'm not open to new ideas. I've learned to drink Bovril and tea for heaven's sake. I've learned to sleep on my back because the borrowed hip doesn't like you sleeping on your side.
I've learned to have a new concept of happiness, like rejoicing the other night because I could take off my elastic stockings for three hours for a party. I've learned to have soap on a rope in case I drop it in the shower, and to carry a pickup stick in case I suddenly forget and bend down to retrieve whatever fell.
At the regular sort of mileage check-in you have to go for afterwards, the surgeon said the hip was doing fine. Before I realised what I was doing, I looked at an X-ray of it with him and when I felt consciousness returning I asked had he left a small golf club in there by any chance?
That's the new hip apparently. His hip. The one I mustn't dislocate by crossing my legs, or emptying the washing machine.
And it all feels so good and pain-free I am of course very conscious of the twinges in the other leg - the one I used to think of as being fairly sound. And I'd like to get that done now, or as soon as possible. But they say that I am, as in everything, far too extreme. The second hip is not nearly bad enough yet. Walk they say, keep walking.
I fear that walking may actually be harmful, I say, bone rubbing against bone . . . could be very bad for you.
No, they say. Walking actually lubricates bones.
They must know, I suppose. They knew everything else, and they kept their promises. I lost the weight and they didn't move the goal posts as I had feared they might.
They did the operation. They said that the operation would not be a nightmare in which I would hear unmerciful sawing on my leg, and that was true also . . . just distant sounds of the booming Emerald Tiger economy. I had no idea it was so near home.
They said that I would eventually stop keeling over and be able to put one foot in front of the other at a time when I was pleading with them to give me a motorised wheelchair and be done with it.
They said that orthopaedic surgery was changing the lives of men, women and children all over the country and people were standing tall, pain-free and able to leave houses where they had been virtually imprisoned.
And I know this is true as I am part of it.
So, if they all seriously believe that this walking thing is important and works well . . . since they have been right about everything so far, it's only fair to give it a go. I won't forget my promises, either, to support the Arthritis Foundation and to encourage those who are fearful of facing the operation that will change their lives.
If you do happen to meet me as I pound along with a fiercely glowering face muttering to myself, I'm only dying for a short interruption, so it would be an act of kindness to stop me for a brief chat. And a kindness to yourself not to make it a lengthy chat as this is not me as I like to think of myself at my best.
But walk I will, because if learning to walk straight without a stick is another way of saying thank you to the surgeon, the nurses, the physiotherapists and all the other good people I met and who wrote to me during this - the strangest and oddly one of the happiest summers of my life - then only a very ungracious person would refuse to do so.