Hip, hip hooray for major surgery and a life free of pain

It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, say the Divinyls. But there’s a gaping chasm between pain and no pain.

It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, according to the Divinyls. But there’s a gaping chasm between pain and no pain, and two weeks on from a successful hip replacement operation, it’s getting blissfully wider with each passing day.

Now, before the eye-rolling begins, permit me these last musings on my recent surgery, following which I faithfully promise to shut up and never mention it again. After four days lying in a hospital bed and two weeks off work getting back on my feet, I’ve had plenty of time to muse on the nature and indeed the psychology of pain.

Hip replacement surgery isn’t the ordeal it used to be, as I’ve noted before, due to advances in surgical techniques, tools and prostheses. But it’s still a major procedure, requiring full anaesthesia and necessitating the hollowing out of hip bone and femur to accept the new ceramic ball and socket of the replacement joint.

And when that anaesthesia wears off, you had better believe it hurts like hell, a bone-deep ache that even the shots of morphine and hillbilly heroin pills can’t completely assuage. But I have found there’s a huge difference between the insidious, quotidian creeping pain that accompanies a crumbling joint — the hopeless hurt of entropy and decay that worsens with each passing day — and post-surgical pain that, while intense, soon begins to wane, with an end in sight.

The latter is bearable; the former is lonely, dire and debilitating, sapping you of hope as it etches its intensity across your features and bends your body to its demands.

I count myself fortunate that in my case an operation was possible and I am well on my way to being largely pain-free again. My heart goes out to those who don’t have such an option and are living with the daily pain of cancer, osteoarthritis or other incurable chronic conditions. And while I was once implacably opposed to euthanasia, I now understand those who feel they have come to the end of their rope and lost the last vestiges of hope due to pain.

Before you judge someone, limp a mile in their shoes (that way, as Billy Connolly pointed out, you’re a mile away and you’ve got their shoes).

The whole business was not without some light relief. My surgery was done at St Vincent’s Private Hospital in deepest Darlinghurst, Sydney. Clad in my bottomless gown, special stockings and stoned out of my gourd on good drugs, it almost seemed a shame I couldn’t sashay down to some of nearby Oxford Street’s more outre pubs and clubs (this would have been difficult, hooked up as I was to a cannula, a catheter and a surgical drain).

I also got a giggle pointing out to the cavalcade of nurses the inadvertent humour of the sign on my wall. It was meant to be read in two columns but I preferred reading it straight across: “Dr Solomon ... Plan for Today!”; “Nurse Courtney ... Deep Breaths!”, “Nurse Elle ... Call for Pain Relief.”

I will admit to being slightly miffed I didn’t get the reputed little push-button post-op gizmo to deliver jolts of morphine. Rather, I only had a button to summon a nurse, who would then have to summon a mate, and the pair would then quiz me as to my name and date of birth and ask me to rate my pain on a scale of one to 10.

It sounds harmless enough, but after the 20th time, it began to assume the proportions of an intense interrogation, like Sir Laurence Olivier bellowing “Is it safe” as he bears down on Dustin Hoffman with a dental drill in Marathon Man, or French Connection Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle inquiring if I pick my feet in Poughkeepsie.

Surely there is a better rating system for pain. A sliding scale from, say, mild annoyance to moderate discomfort to darned painful to worse than childbirth to head-swivelling, expletive-shrieking, green-vomiting give-me-the-drugs-now-or-kill-me wracking agony.

There was advice from friends and family: “Try playing mind games whereby one accepts pain as simply a sensation, exactly the same as pleasure. How the physical body reacts to this can be controlled by the mind. I have used this method to get me through some horrific pain. The body will only accept what one is able to tolerate.”

This was from the dentist uncle who used the same rhetoric to once convince me to allow him to drill a cavity with no anaesthetic. My response now is as it was then: “I wanna be sedated.”