State of denial

FRANKLY, I don’t think being in a state of denial comes naturally to me. But you don’t get better at something by not doing it, so I’ve been practicing assiduously for two weeks.

Now I’m just about swallowing my husband’s idea that his hip replacement is going to serve as some sort of light relief or jolly jape after the excoriating business of our daughter’s neurosurgery 10 weeks ago.

It strikes me that being — never mind remaining — in a state of denial is exactly like patching up a clinker-built boat, which incidentally, is a heartfelt analogy, for we used to have an old timber clinker when the kids were small, and patching up a clinker takes a lot of work.

So. I’ve constructed each day like I’m patching up the clinker; making sure the planks fit together neatly so there are no chinks or holes where the truth or negative thoughts might seep through.

“Hip replacement as a jolly jape,” I’ve thought, fixing up the planks every day, “hip replacement as light relief.”

Now, on the morning of his surgery, he’s standing by our bed, packing his hospital bag and looking chipper.

Very chipper. In fact, I’ve never seen him look so chipper.

“I’m nervous for you,” I blurt, from bed. I can’t help it. It just comes straight out, seeping through a tiny chink.

“New axle on an old banger, that’s all,” he says, leaning over the bed to kiss me goodbye. “I’ll be up and about in no time,”

“Why are you wearing your sports gear?” I say.

“I’m going to the gym first,” he says, “then on to the hospital.”

A new chink appears suddenly, and through it trickles a memory of me throwing a crutch at my husband when he was recovering from another sports-related injury that he’d caused himself. This is when it occurs to me that what with all the work I’ve put into damming up thoughts of post-op risks and complications, I’ve forgotten to think about his recovery in terms of it being a condition of hard work and unremitting wifely subjection. And as such, a test which I am absolutely bound to fail.

I say quickly. “You know that the ‘you master, me slave,’ relationship model has never worked out for any...”

“It’ll be fine,” he interrupts, “it’s not going to impact on you at all. See you this evening,” he says, and limp-runs down the stairs.

En route to hospital, on my husband’s instruction, I stop off in a specialist chemist, where all sorts of chinks, gaps and holes appear in my state of denial. I find it’s much, much harder to swallow the “hip-replacement as a jolly jape” idea when you have to flag down a sales girl, and ask where you might find “the raised toilet-seats, please. My husband says the six-inch one, not the four”.

In hospital, I find him post-op, in bed, spaced out on morphine and talking on his mobile to my brother in Geneva about Mont Blanc.

“How are you?” I inquire, “and what’s Mont Blanc?”

“A mountain,” he says, ” Highest mountain in the Alps. I’m climbing it next summer. Just arranged it now with your brothers. Christ, itch my foot for me there would you? Left foot. My little toe is driving me crazy for some reason. I can’t reach it.”

And all of a sudden, I’m done with patching up the clinker — I never once got into that stupid boat without a bailing bucket — and never mind the morphine, he must remember I’ve never been great with feet.

Enough with the jolly japes. It is time for us to face the truth. One of us has to tell it, straight up.

So I walk down to the end of his bed and look at his toes in their compression stockings.

“After the next injury,” I say, taking his left foot in my hand, “I’m putting you in a home. And you can be thinking about that at the top of Mont Blanc.”