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  BY MAEVE BINCHY

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  ACHES & PAINS

  MAEVE BINCHY

  Illustrated by WENDY SHEA

  For dear Gordon, and all the other

  good people who made me better.

  MAEVE BINCHY

  For Freida and Eileen - there’s only

  one of each.

  WENDY SHEA

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Dedication

  By Maeve Binchy

  Aches & Pains

  Copyright

  ACHES & PAINS

  This is a ‘Cheer up’ book. Not ‘Cheer up, it may never happen’ … because to some extent it has happened. You’re not well. Not ‘Cheer up because there are people much worse off’. That is a ludicrous piece of advice. Are we seriously meant to feel better when told someone else is in bad shape? Not ‘Cheer up because the rest of us are sick of looking at your misery-ridden face and you’re actually depressing everyone in a radius of five kilometres’.

  It’s really a sort of survival manual: some nanny-ish advice about how to muddle through a time of aches and pains. There’s also a slight touch of the head girl mentality in it, I think. And though neither Wendy Shea nor I were ever head girl material, we have each long had this feeling that we could run the universe quite adequately if asked to in a polite tone of voice.

  Not that either of us is a very good role model for anyone with aches and pains. There was an awful lot of grizzling and anxious whingeing as we both packed our suitcases and went off, hearts pounding, to different hospitals to get hip replacements. No medals for bravery were pinned to either of our nighties during our stay in hospital.

  But on the other hand, things weren’t nearly as bad as we thought they would be. You can get used to anything after a while, and I am still automatically offering my arm every time I see anyone in uniform, expecting to have it wrapped up while blood pressure is taken or stuck with needles while blood is injected or removed. I’ve offered my arm to air stewardesses and cinema ushers and security guards in a kind of reflex reaction, but so far none of them has taken me up on it.

  I was very interested in other people in hospital, and had amazing conversations in the corridors with total strangers as I limped around with them. Together we would study the hip manual and note that sexual intercourse could be attempted after so many weeks, which was a good topic of conversation at the water cooler. The hip manual also said that after eight weeks we should be able to drive.

  ‘That’s great,’ one man said wistfully. ‘I always wanted to know how to drive but I never had time to learn, it will be a huge advantage to me.’

  Wendy and I both met, in our separate hospitals, fellow patients who were optimistic, cheerful and interested in others. We also met people with weaselish bad tempers who were driving their families insane, and gloomboots who thought no medication was working and suspected incipient clots in every part of their body. We met those frightened that they wouldn’t get cured and get back to work, and those who were already malingering and plotting scams to stay out longer.

  We learned awful things about healthy eating plans, and good posture and the amount of exercise that normal people are meant to take.

  And Wendy and I both got a whole new lease of life from the new legs, and wanted, as a thank-you, to try to raise some funds to support the good work of the Arthritis Research Campaign, which you are helping to do by buying this book.

  But we also wanted to pass on the wisdom that the cheerful survive somehow better and help themselves as well as everyone else along the way. The wallowing in other people’s sympathy doesn’t do all that much to make you feel better. How many times do you want anyone to say ‘How terrible it must be for you’?

  Everyone is different, and of course there are people for whom the ultra-sympathetic tones and hours of listening to their ailments are what will make them better. Speaking personally, I’d be afraid to risk it.

  It’s not that I wasn’t grateful for sympathy during two years of great pain and much disablement before the operation. I suppose I’m afraid the sympathy fuse is short and can be tried to breaking point, so I allowed myself to indulge in it very sparingly. I said I was fine when I was terrible, and I was much better when I was much worse, and I was full of hope when I was glum with despair.

  It worked so well that some people said there was nothing at all wrong with me, except that I seemed for some reason to be bent double, walking on two sticks, yelping a bit and unable to climb three steps. Others, who knew there was quite a bit more to it, realised that this was the way I wanted to play it and went along with it. So not only did I see good humour and optimism reflected in the faces I looked at, which was immensely cheering, but the approach worked when I was alone. I had said so often that I was great I almost believed it myself. And on the odd day when I really did need the shoulder to wail on I felt I could ask for it because it wasn’t already sodden with the damp of a thousand wails.

  I admit that after the operation, I didn’t want people to be brisk and dismissive either, saying ‘Nonsense, there’s nothing to it’, when they stood there on their two good legs and I had a contraption tied to me to make sure I didn’t lie on my side by accident. I didn’t want them to minimise it, and say that everyone, including the dogs in the street, were having these joint replacements all the time these days.

  And I certainly didn’t like being offered the healing power of crystals, the address of a seventh son of a seventh son, a pounded mixture of herbs to apply to the afflicted part, a copper anklet or a mantra never known to fail.

  What did I want then?

  I suppose like anyone I wanted to be treated with concern and affection, but most of all to be treated as if things were normal, as they had once been, and would be again not so very far in the future.

  If that’s what you want, how do you get people to treat you like that? The good news is that it’s the invalid who calls the shots. All we have to do if we want to avoid sepulchral sympathy, remorseless heartiness or off-the-wall cures – whichever is most maddening – is to send out the right vibes.

  I’m not at all suggesting we ignore symptoms, refuse treatment and abandon everything that modern medicine can do for us. Absolutely the contrary. We should seek advice early and then take it. We should rejoice that we live after rather than during the days of leeches and bleedings and dosing with unmentionable things. If ever there was a reason not to mourn the passing of the good old days, it would be in terms of health.

  Nor is this book about putting on a show for the visitor. It’s about coming to terms with the fact that our bodies are not invincible after all; realising that we are not toddlers who have fallen over and will get up ten se
conds later to waddle on.

  It’s only human to be anxious and doubtful and sometimes just outraged that parts of us aren’t working properly. We vow that if only this pain or that ache would go then we will never complain again. We spend futile hours looking back on a misspent life and blaming ourselves for whatever has befallen us.

  This is natural. There’s really no such thing as a naturally good patient. Who is able to be genuinely good-tempered through wheezes and snuffles and fractures and labour pains and attacks of nausea? But eventually, we probably learn to be slightly better patients than we feel like being. Partly for social survival, but partly for sheer self-preservation, we learn to cheer up.

  I hope that there is something in this book that will cheer you up. Not too boisterously, as if a manic face were two inches from yours saying menacingly, ‘You will be good-humoured or else’. I have met too many professional Pollyannas in my life to think that good humour can be imposed on people successfully.

  And I hope nothing in this book will suggest that it was written and illustrated by two people with a huge history of courage and stoicism. In fact, the next time either of us are poorly, we may well have to consult ourselves here to recall why we were so over-confident as to produce a manual advising all around us on attitude and behaviour.

  But it is written with great sympathy, a fairly light heart and a genuine belief that nothing is quite as bad as it seems at four o’clock in the morning.

  MAEVE BINCHY

  BARING YOUR BODY

  Did anyone ever say that going for a medical examination is somehow in the same league as entering a beauty competition?

  Yet nurses say they are driven mad by time-wasting false modesty, and insanely apologetic attitudes about what is, after all, just a human body. Although sympathetic and aware of how low some people’s self-esteem can be, particularly at a time of ill health, medical staff say they often wish there was some kind of basic training course for patients, something to convince them that this is not an exhibition or a peep show. It’s an attempt to find out what is wrong with them and cure it.

  They report patients who clutch onto hospital gowns when asked to remove them, as if the staff were just about to play the music and ask them to do the Full Monty for the X-ray department. Many women tense up at the thought that people may be studying their stretch marks or odd stomach flaps and reporting their deeply unsatisfactory findings all over the city.

  But when a man is asked to take off his shirt so that someone with a stethoscope can listen to his lungs, that’s what they are actually doing, listening to his lungs. They are not measuring him up as an understudy for Schwarzenegger, or checking out his swelling biceps and manly shoulders, and finding him wanting.

  When a woman removes her clothes to place her breast into the contraption that will deliver a mammogram she is not being auditioned for a Playboy centrefold, she is wisely getting herself tested for pre-cancerous cells.

  A man who suspects he may have a prostate or hernia problem cannot be examined for either while in his city clothes. A woman can hardly have a smear test while wearing the baggy leggings of her pink track suit.

  Yes, the medical examination does seem just one further indignity, inviting humiliation and vulnerability, at the very time when it’s least tolerable. None of us would choose to have to show to complete strangers the parts of ourselves that most other human eyes don’t reach. But they have seen all those bits of people before. In fact they are seeing such bits all day long.

  When we realise that self-consciousness is self-obsessiveness, it’s much easier to take off our clothes as quickly as possible and get whatever it is done.

  I speak from the point of view of someone not at all satisfied with a body image, but lucky enough to know it’s of no interest to anyone on earth except myself. I was helped by a happy childhood where we were all told we looked great and believed it, and by good friends along the way who were never part of any style police.

  But I think I was also greatly helped by going to a nudist colony by accident. I was going as a journalist to write about it, and I turned up on the bus with my clothes on, intending to leave them on. But the bus went, and either I took my clothes off or I sat on the side of the road for eight hours until another bus came back to find me. It was in Yugoslavia and it was very hot. I took my clothes off.

  I went into the camp and hid behind a bush. Then I crept out a bit and sat sort of covering myself with my handbag on my lap and my arms across my chest, smoking in a frenzy.

  And then slowly I noticed people with the most horrific shapes and dangling bits and extraordinary appendages going by, and nobody was paying a blind bit of notice. So I got the courage to slink along the wall towards the restaurant.

  I joined the regular campers, and we sat in cafés all day with bits of us falling into the soup, and our bottoms roasting on hot seats. Occasionally we fell into the sea without having to put on or take off swimming costumes. And eventually my eyes stopped looking at the white bits of people and I just got on with the day like everyone else.

  It was about the most liberating thing I ever did. I would wish the same sense of freedom to all those I see covering themselves and refusing to come out from behind screens. Who do they think is running some kind of check on them? Why do they think their individual bodies would be of such interest to other people? And that’s only in Out-Patients. By the time you get them into a hospital bed there’s a whole new set of neuroses.

  A lot of these are bedpan-orientated. Again, it’s only natural to be slightly embarrassed that what is usually done in the privacy of a bathroom has to be done in a container in bed and the results removed by someone else.

  I made official enquiries about what was the very best thing patients could do about this from a nurse’s point of view. The answer was unanimous. They didn’t want any theatrics over the bedpan. It was part of their work, people who couldn’t move from bed had to have them.

  Politeness was always acceptable, and nurses like everyone else always appreciated a word of thanks. But apologies were out of place. It was like trying to deny bodily functions, which was idiotic. As one nurse said very succinctly to me when, like everyone, I apologised for having to use a bedpan, ‘Look at it this way, Maeve, if I weren’t washing your bottom I’d be washing someone else’s’. Which indeed was undeniable.

  WHAT’LLYOU HAVE?

  I’ve found six non-alcoholic drinks that taste fine just as long as you don’t think they are anything other than what they are. The whole secret is not trying anything that pretends to taste remotely like a real drink.

  1) Chilled consommé, served in a glass with freshly ground pepper and a slice of lemon.

  2) Alcohol-free lager mixed with orange juice and lemon juice, decorated with slices of orange.

  3) Angostura Bitters in a big glass filled up with tonic water and a slice of lime on top.

  4) Tomato juice with a little Tabasco, served with a topping of finely chopped red peppers.

  5) Strawberries and melon blended together and served in a small glass with fresh mint.

  6) Iced coffee in a big glass mug served with a big scoop of ice cream on top.

  RELAX … LET THEM

  LOOK AFTER YOU

  Why must the show go on?

  There really is no good reason. If you’re ill, recovering from an illness or operation, or just not able to cope for a bit, this is the time to call in the troops.

  We must all try to break the habit of a lifetime, thinking we can deal with everything, and instead decide we should allow those who are concerned about us to do something to help. People actually like to be told what they can do if they offer to help. They are always offering, begging you to think of something they could do for you at this time. Suppose you were to say to people that there really were a few jobs which would be a huge help? Aren’t you truly delighted to do something to help someone else?

  In fact, if we’re brutally honest, we would all prefer to do one fairly
specific thing to help, rather than to sign on for life as a slave. So a truly thoughtful patient might just think up a list of ten little jobs for the ten people who had offered to help. They would then be overjoyed, and feel important and indispensable. You’d be doing them a favour. You could ask someone to:

  Cut the grass.

  Do the ironing.

  Take out the rubbish bins.

  Make you a soup.

  Take the hound for a walk.

  Vacuum the floor.

  Defrost the fridge.

  Paint your nails.

  Go to the bookies.

  And a million other things you can think of while you rest and recover your strength.

  FIVE THINGS YOU CAN SAY TO

  ANNOY THE PATIENT IN THE

  NEXT BED

  1) ‘Oh, was that your husband? I thought it was your son.’

  2) ‘Very wise of you not to have too many visitors.’

  3) ‘Will they be bringing you in a proper dressing gown at all?’

  4) ‘Would you like this book someone gave me? It’s pure rubbish. I can’t bear it myself.’

  5) ‘You were talking in your sleep last night; I hope you don’t talk like that when you’re at home with your wife!’

  HOSPITAL HORROR STORIES

  There’s some awful, deep-seated thing in people that makes them tell you hospital horror stories when you’re not well.