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Sport 36: Winter 2008

After

After

The fog is clearing. I have forgotten so much of what it was like last time. When I close my eyes I see things in stark well-defined colours, like the movies. Is it the morphine? There's lots of movement. Vibrant swirling colours and numerous vases, vessels, page 96urns. Calabash. Shapes like bodies, like places to hold flowers.

Did I nearly die? Loud voices shooting up and down corridors jarring like nails through bone.

So much to be scared of…

*

The early days are like scattered jigsaw pieces.

I am relieved when I come round. Thank goodness it's over, I think.

The anaesthetist appears just inside the curtain.

How are you?

Okay. How'd it go?

It was dan… challenging. On a scale of one to ten, what's the pain like?

I don't like having to lasso pain into my mind long enough for it to settle on a ladder. Four, five, I say. Ten is the step before hell and I want to leave lots of room to move.

There is a phone call from my brother, from Hamilton. He and his wife are both trained nurses and they like to know the details. I haven't heard the report from the surgeon and the operation notes don't say everything. Somehow I know I've lost a lot of blood. How much? I ask the nurse. All my own and half again, I relay to Kevin. There is a pause at the end of the phone.

I later learn the surgeon did come round. That my mother was there. That he said to her the operation was horrible. Just horrible.

I leave the Intensive Care Unit and am taken back to the ward. A nurse has noticed it's my birthday and has placed a bunch of balloons up in the corner of my room. This is called day one. Thirty-nine years for me and day one for my hip. There are more phone calls and visitors slipping in and out of vacant places in my head. There is all of that. And sometime there must have been the surgeon telling me. Somewhere there must have been the details. That this hip replacement was difficult to take out. That in the process of extraction, my femur page 97fractured in three places. That now, as well as the long shaft of metal, there are loops of cabling and somebody else's bone grafted onto my thin portions.