35. Pain, Piles and Prostate Surgery

[Note: for the origin of this letter see Blog 30]

4th December 1980

Dear Mum, Dad and family,

Your timely letter arrived yesterday conveying all your love and best wishes for to-day. At the moment I am sitting around waiting for various tests, having just been admitted to the hospital which is in a pleasant part of Auckland called St. Heliers in the Eastern suburbs. It is a beautiful day so it is a pity to be confined. I should have the surgery late this afternoon and then spend a few days here I expect and hopefully I shall be able to convalesce at home after the weekend. I have brought a lot of books to read and have a mountain of correspondence to catch up on but whether I shall feel like doing much we shall have to wait and see.

Last weekend we went down to Taupo to stay with friends, leaving on Friday afternoon and coming back on Monday evening. Saturday was a fine day and I went fishing in the evening on the lake and caught three trout, the largest about four and a half pounds. They make a lovely meal but the cold and potential seasickness on the boat don’t make it too exciting a sport for me. On the Sunday it rained and rained so we sat around and chatted most of the day. It made a break for us, particularly for Mary who is very tired what with the Tech and the demands of the salon at this time of year, but was all too short.

Lewis had a good birthday but since then has broken his wrist – a greenstick fracture – and is all plastered up. He fell, or rolled, down a bank. He had a new bicycle for his birthday so I expect he’s a bit fed up he can’t use it too much for a few weeks. We had a tea party for him on Sugar Mountain followed by a bonfire and fireworks that we had saved from November 5th so that made a bit of a change. I haven’t really made any plans for the summer holidays as I want to be fit again first and see how I feel – and we also want to save our pennies for the big trip next year. Mary has just had a pay rise so that will help although we read gloomy tales about the economic situation in the U.K.

I will leave this open to finish off after the op,
So all my love for now, John. XX

Friday 5^th
I am alive and well if a bit tender in the rear! I didn’t finally go to the operating theatre until after 5pm last evening and woke about 11pm. I was starving! but have since had a good breakfast and been up and about. Thanks for all your prayers – they worked a treat.
Love John.

Have just called in to the hospital 10am Friday and am happily surprised that John is really looking great. I sent him some flowers and a Xmas arrangement with your money yesterday. I felt quite miserable having to leave him in hospital. He would have come home then and there if he could. So don’t worry he is looking fine. Not up to a lot of coughing or laughing yet but then that’s not a huge problem. Keep the prayers going – we will say a few for you as well. Love Mary XX

Just a quick card. Christmas has crept up on us very quickly this year what with one thing and another. I am really fine after the operation and have no pain although I have to take it easy for a couple more weeks. It was great to hear your voices on the telephone and to know that you had been thinking of me. I forgot to thank you for the flowers that you sent, via Mary, whilst I was in hospital. The surgeon reckons I shall be good for at least twenty years and that seems like a bargain in return for only a week’s discomfort. Lots of love from us all here.

John, Mary and the children.

Well, It’s more than thirty years now so the surgeon is right on that score. But no pain? And only some ‘discomfort’? I have a wry smile reading that. I have had a few dramas with hospitals over the years what with one thing and another, and once or twice imagined I might die, but never again the mind-blowing pain of that first week after the operation on my piles. I thought I was pretty stoic and had a high pain threshold. I still think that, having been sorely tested in recent years, ‘bloody but unbowed’ as I am ‘under the bludgeonings of chance.’ I don’t remember any great pain when my eight-year-old tonsils and adenoids are removed. There is some brief if excruciating pain when the medial cartilage in my right knee gives way in the delivery stride as I lose my footing bowling flat out for the M.C.C. on a wet wicket (the club I have all the medallions for, the Middleton Cricket Club!) and again when our idiot of a family doctor at Enfield wrenches my swollen knee and adds badly torn ligaments to my injury. But no pain that I can recall when, after a number of embarrassing run outs when my knee gives way during sharp singles, I finally have the cartilage removed at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge and the next morning, determined to impress the lovely dark eyed Hungarian physiotherapist Maria with the muscle definition in my quadriceps, I grit my teeth to lift my injured leg off the bed a day ahead of her schedule. And when it is my turn for legitis and hip replacements there is only one nasty moment when, second time round, as I am crunched up precariously in a foetal ball on the operating table at the Mater Misericorde, the anaesthetist repeatedly strikes my spinal column in his botched attempt to administer the epidural and the nurse hovering over me kindly wipes away the single silent tear that forms in each eye. That is painful. As is the biopsy when the South African nurse in the Harley Street clinic eases a cutting tool up my rectum, a tool that looks like a miniature set of tree shears designed to snip fruit from out-of-reach upper branches, and clips six little pieces from my prostate gland. That certainly makes me jump. Six times.

But nothing, not laughing with a broken rib, or the horror and humour of acute urinary retention, or peeing blood after surgery, has ever compared with those first few 1980 post-pile rites of passage. My routine is to take two paracetamol and, ten minutes or so later, run as hot a bath as my body can stand, adding a large splash of Dettol to the water, and then take up my position in the toilet next door, keeping the door open ready to run at the earliest opportunity and plunge into the bath. Those, what, ten or twenty seconds once or twice a day for perhaps a week, that is pain. It sends me to Rabelais for relief, sends me exploring the scatological literature, sends me to research and write a mercifully unpublished pastiche of The Hite Report – I still have the Certificate of Registration from the United States Copyright Office in the Library of Congress dated October 5^th 1982 - and to collect and retell strongly flavoured tales and jokes that provide distraction for Mary through the agonies of her recurring cancer. And leaves me with an abiding taste for black comedy, for a robust comic anger in the face of death and disaster, such that the only programme on television I always make time for in recent years is the mordant Six Feet Under.

So, what with John Lennon being shot that week in 1980, it is a shitty and painful time. I also miss out on the Roberta Flack concert we have booked months in advance and Mary goes with her sister Anita instead. [There was one amusing sideline to my haemorrhoidendectomy, however. My proctologist was called Mr Proctor (and I recently had hip surgery with a Mr Walker). I asked Mr Proctor why he had chosen his medical specialism. He explained that as a medical student he liked to have a few drinks and thought it best, during ward rounds, to focus on the end of the patient where his breath wouldn't betray him.]

I still have my Rabelaisian parody and it still gives me a smile. How oddly people behave when under extreme stress. And I see I prefaced my report with a quote from Balzac: ‘As children only do we laugh, and as we travel onward laughter sinks down and dies out. To laugh you must be innocent and pure of heart.’

But it wasn’t an easy time to laugh.