MY LIFE© - CHAPTER 43 - MY HIP REPLACEMENT OPERATION

On the 29^th September 2020 – yes, the Covid Year - I went in to St Bernard’s for the hip operation …. Finally! … Mr Boerger (silly thing calling a Doctor by plain "Mister" once he becomes a surgeon!) saw me, and seeing as he was in a good mood, I half-jokingly asked if he was going to increase the length of my right leg as I had suggested in a previous meeting we had.
“We shall increase it as I said I would, but I cannot make it as long as the left one. That would put too much strain on the muscles, ligaments, tendons on your right leg which has been used to the length it has now after so many years.”
This was great news. When I was 10 I broke my right leg in a fall. Greenstick fracture at the head of the femur and that pet of the femur never grew from then on.

I have had a difference of just under 5cm in length and been making it up over the 63 years using both internal lifts and at time also externally higher heel on all by footwear.

Thank God the operation went very well …apparently. I woke up and for the first time in over 60 years I saw both my legs almost the same length. I was overjoyed! ….then it all went pear-shaped.
On the second day I started getting hiccups. Not the normal, annoying kind, these were strange hiccups which started as normal ones but each time, each hiccup, was stronger than the previous one, rising in crescendo till they were so painful I was doubled up in pain and crying out for relief. At first I was told it could be a side effect of the anaesthesia (???) …. two days after the operation??? But as each bout was stronger and more painful, they realised something was wrong. In one of the more painful bouts, I spasm-ed violently and vomited a huge amount of …black stuff all over myself and the floor. From then on it was a whirlwind of action and my mind could no longer follow what was happening.

Apparently I was rushed to Dr Latin for an emergency endoscopy during which I again vomited what was in reality blood from a burst ulcer. I was rushed to the ICU (Intensive Care Unit)… not that I recall at all. My son Asher tells me he was called in and told I was in a critical state.
I remember very little of that. I thought I was in ICU for a day or 2 … but apparently it was longer. I do not remember Asher being there at all … though he was and he fed me some light soup, all I could have after a couple of days there. What I do remember is losing my sanity!
The ICU ward is all satin-finished frames for clear glass and white walls. However what I was seeing was … as if I were in a busy shopping street … in New York, no less. I saw brightly-lit shop windows displaying beautifully embroider ergs or tapestries … I saw people walking along that street I was convinced was Broadway. But then I was caught up in a panic. I was convinced the nurses were going to kill me!
Along the aluminium frames I saw runes engraved in a strange language I could not decipher. Spells? Incantations?  I do remember asking Asher if he could see them too, obviously not ….but it scared him to realise how far gone me sanity was. I spent hours trying to read them… to understand their message … to no avail.
If any of you ever saw the film The Devil’s Advocate …. There is a scene in a shop changing room where Charleze Theron is changing with the wives of other lawyers and out of the corner of her eye she sees that these other women are demons in human disguise. She sees the demon moving inside the bodies of these other women. This is what I saw in the nurses (males) who I was convinced were out to kill me … demons in human guise! I remember telling one of them:
“You want to kill me… I know it”
He looked strangely at me … then I remember nothing else but the incredible fear which gripped me.
In my youth I had tried “acid” and “magic mushrooms”, both of which created hallucinations in my mind … but somewhere in my head even then was the knowledge I had taken something and would come out of it. Not in this case. In this case the fear had no area of sanity I could reach back for. I was unable to move in my bed and I “knew” that when I fell unconscious again, the nurse/nurses would come and kill me.
I have never been so afraid in all my life …. EVER!
Gradually I came back from that terrible place … sanity had returned.  But I had lost all sense of time during my stay in the ICU, all memory other than what I have written above.
My departure from the ICU was …. less than elegant.
I had eaten very little during those days there, light soup and nothing else, and not much of that either. The doctors who came to see me daily (so they tell me) were concerned I had not moved my bowels at all during all those days, so as I was back in the sane world and better, they gave me back my two crutches, and a laxative. After some hours, feeling some movement coming, I hobbled to the toilet…. Only to be told:
“No, that toilet is closed because of Covid. Go to the end and around the corner to the other one”.
By then my insides were ready to burst!
I rushed as best one can, on one good leg and crutches. When I reached the toilet ….. it was occupied! It was one of those nightmare moments when you know … you just KNOW… there was no holding back. I knocked desperately on the door.
“Let me in … please let me in … ‘no puedo agauntar mas!’”
From inside I heard an old man’s voice:
“OK, OK…. Yo salgo y entra tu, y despues entrare yo” (OK, OK, I’m coming out so you can come in, I wait)
The door opened. This grey hared old gentleman came out holding his pans up and I rushed in banging the door shut after me.
I barely made it over the toilet when …. Krakatoa! … It was no longer moving my bowels, it was a virtual eruption of relief.
“Ya esta?” (Finished?) asked the old man from outside trying to open the door for his own relief.
“NO!” I shouted back … uncertain if in anger or in warning.
I pulled the red emergency cord …only to have it snap in my hand!
The old man managed to open the door and step in ….only to beat a hasty retreat holding his breath.  He called out and a nurse came to my rescue, and boy, did I need rescuing!
That same afternoon I was moved back to the normal ward. As it happened, so was the old gentleman too. I was in a room for two, and as he as about to come in to share it with me he looked up and saw me.
“No… aqui con este no…!” (No, not here with this guy) and he backed out quickly to another room.
I cannot blame him.
When I was back in Dudley Toomey Ward the irony of it all made me smile.

Back in 1956 when I fell and broke my leg, I was under the care of Dr Dudley Toomey, after whom the ward was named. I had end up in “his” ward for an operation to correct the fracture he had treated me for 63 years earlier!