Therapy

palsy, haemophilia and epilepsy. Not to mention war, pestilence and famine. Funny how knowing that doesn’t make the pain in your knee any easier to bear.
     
    Perhaps it’s what they call “compassion fatigue”, the idea that we get so much human suffering thrust in our faces every day from the media that we’ve become sort of numbed, we’ve used up all our reserves of pity, anger, outrage, and can only think of the pain in our own knee. I haven’t got to that stage yet, not quite, but I know what they mean. I get a lot of charity appeals through the mail. I think they pass names and addresses to each other: you only have to make a donation to one organization and, before you know where you are, the envelopes are falling through the letterbox faster than you can pick them up. OXFAM, CAFOD, UNICEF, Save the Children, Royal Institute for the Blind, Red Cross, Imperial Cancer, Muscular Dystrophy, Shelter, etc. etc., all containing form letters and leaflets printed on recycled paper with smudgy b/w pictures of starving black babies with limbs like twigs and heads like old men, or young kids in wheelchairs, or stunned-looking refugees, or amputees on crutches. How is one supposed to stem this tide of human misery? Well, I’ll tell you what I do. I subscribe a thousand pounds a year to an organization that gives you a special cheque book to make donations to the charities of your choice. They also recover the tax you’ve paid on the money, which bumps it up to £1400 in my case. So every year I dispense fourteen hundred quid in little parcels: £50 for the starving babies of Somalia, £30 for the rape victims in Bosnia, £45 towards a water pump in Bangladesh, £25 to a drug-abuse rehabilitation unit in Basildon, £30 for AIDS research, and so on, until the account is empty. It’s rather like trying to mop up the oceans of the world with a box of Kleenex, but it keeps compassion fatigue at bay.
    Of course, I could afford to give much more. I could afford ten thousand a year from my present income, without too much pain. I could give it all away, for that matter, it still wouldn’t be more than a box of Kleenex. So I keep most of it and spend it on, among other things, private medical treatment for my knee.
     
    I went to my GP first. He recommended physiotherapy. After a while, the physiotherapist recommended that I see a consultant. The consultant recommended an arthroscopy. That’s a new kind of hi-tech microsurgery, all done by television and fibre-optics. The surgeon pumps water into your leg to create a kind of studio in there, and then sticks three needle-thin instruments into it. One has a camera on the end, another is a cutting tool and the third is a pump for sucking out the debris. They’re so fine you can hardly tell the difference between them with the naked eye and the surgeon doesn’t even have to put a stitch in the perforations afterwards. He sees what’s wrong with your knee-joint by wiggling it about and watching it on a TV monitor, and then cuts away the torn cartilage or tissue or rough bit of bone or whatever it is that’s causing the trouble. I’d heard that some patients have just a local anaesthetic and watch the whole operation on the monitor as it’s being done, but I didn’t fancy that, and said so. Nizar smiled reassuringly. (That’s the name of my orthopaedic consultant, Mr Nizar. I call him Knees ’R Us. Not to his face, of course. He’s from the Near East, Lebanon or Syria or one of those places, and well out of it from what I hear.) He said I would have a general anaesthetic, but he would give me a videotape of the op to take home. He wasn’t joking, either. I knew people had their weddings and christenings and holidays videotaped nowadays instead of photographed, but I didn’t know it had got as far as operations. I suppose you could make up a little compilation and invite your friends round to view it over wine and cheese. “ That’s my appendectomy, had it done in 1984, or was it ’85... neat, eh?... And this is my open heart surgery, oops, a little bit of camera-jog there... Dorothy ’s womb-scrape is coming up next ... ” [Memo: idea for The People Next Door in this?] I said to Nizar, “You could probably run a little videorental business on the side for folk who haven’t had any operations of their own.” He laughed. He was very confident about the arthroscopy. He claimed that there was a ninety-five per cent success rate. I suppose somebody’s got to