“I am very much looking forward to being an OAP”
She’s trying out her brand new hip at home. I’m to make sure all is going well post-op. I’m equipped for this task with a great and abiding fondness for my mother-in-law (despite the fixed opinions), the usual mild apprehension (due to fixed opinions), and no previous experience — unless a dusty and now obsolete nursing qualification counts.
My sister-in-law phones me on the train to give me instructions — based on her own experience of looking after her mum — as to how to manage. “Mobility, mobility, mobility,” she says, “although you might have to fight her on this.”
I’m not confident that these instructions will be much help, considering the fixed opinions.
After this, my mother — another woman of opinions, expressed in uniquely trenchant way — phones me. She’s driving up to Anne’s from Cornwall as we speak.
“What she needs is flat bed-rest,” she says. “Thank god I got my hip done twenty years ago — and not today. It’s ridiculous — these days, the second you’ve had your op, the doctors expect you to leap out of bed! Like Usain Bolt! ‘On your marks, get set, GO!’ Twenty years ago, it was ‘lie like a corpse for six weeks,’ and I’m jolly glad I did.
“I mean look at me, my doctor calls me a living legend! Twenty-two years with the same metal hip! I climbed the mountains in the Hindu Kush on this hip, don’t forget — and all because I lay like the dead afterwards.”
She intends telling Anne that if she wants to climb in the Hindu Kush, she’s going to have to lie like the dead.
I remind my mother that Anne is eighty and anyway, less a sort of Hindu Kush person and more a pillar-of-the-local-community one. I repeat my sister-in-law’s post-operative mantra, “mobility, mobility, mobility”, and explain that it’s consistent with global, expert medical view. “Complete crap,” she says.
I arrive at Anne’s shortly after my mother. I fear I might have my work cut out; my mother has already advised strongly and in no uncertain terms, that Anne lies like a corpse. Dutifully, I pass on my sister-in-law’s advice. Meanwhile, Anne ignores it all and does what exactly she wants, only with a limp and stick. She has every intention of continuing as a pillar of the local community.
This she will do, she says, on a mobility scooter for now — a device which sits outside in the garage, covered with blankets, so as to deter, I can only suppose, wildly-geriatric thieves from pinching it.
Middle ground is found: abduction, foot pump and buttock-strengthening exercises are immediately abandoned and we each find our groove in Anne’s midway space — bang between mobility, mobility, mobility and lying like a corpse.
We rise late in the morning; take tea and toast in pyjamas downstairs. Mum and Anne organise themselves upstairs and resume their position afterwards at the kitchen table to chat. I assume the role of barista and lunch-maker.
In their advanced years, both women have not so much sagged into the chair of dogmatism as sat upright on the edge of it, bouncing up and down with vim and vigour; they talk about everything — exchange similar and divergent opinions — and laugh at much. I’m the butt of quite a few of their jokes, as is my husband but never, I note, our children. Both agree our children are perfect. After lunch, I dispatch Anne to bed with hot-water-bottle for a rest, while mum and I prepare dinner in leisurely manner, and read.
After lunch, we decide that enlivenment is the requisite thing.
To this end, I suggest we all take turns on the mobility scooter. (Easy to operate — and if you turn the speed dial from “Tortoise Setting” to the more thrilling “Hare” you can go at quite a clip.)
Then there is more tea, chat and supper. I make up three hot water bottles — such a comfort — and we all depart early to bed with books.
I don’t know what I’m going to tell my sister-inlaw about the mobility, mobility, mobility.
But I am very much looking forward to being an OAP.
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