Therapy

long journey through more corridors — then suddenly everything changed. I passed through swing doors from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, from Victorian Gothic to hi-tech modern. It was like stepping on to a brightly lit, elegant studio set after stumbling about in the dark, cable-encumbered space at the back of a sound stage. Everything was white and silver, stainless and gleaming in the diffused light, and the medical staff welcomed me with kind smiles and soft, cultured voices. I was deftly lifted off the stretcher and onto another, more sophisticated mobile bed, on which I was wheeled into an anteroom where the anaesthetist was waiting. He asked me to flex my left hand, and warned me in soothing tones to expect a slight prick as he inserted a kind of plastic valve into a vein in my arm. Nizar sauntered into the room, swathed in pale blue theatre overalls and wearing a snood over his hair, looking like a plump pyjama-clad housewife who had just risen from her bed and hadn’t taken her curlers out yet. “ ’Morning, old bean,” he greeted me. “Everything tickety-boo?” Nizar speaks immaculate English, but I think he must have read a lot of P. G. Wodehouse once. I was about to say, no, it hadn’t been at all tickety-boo so far, but this didn’t seem the right moment to complain about my reception. Besides, a warm drowsy feeling of well-being was beginning to come over me. Nizar was looking at X-rays of my knee, holding them up before a lighted screen. “Ah yes,” he murmured to himself, as if vaguely recognizing a snapshot of some fleeting acquaintance from the past. He came over and stood at the side of the bed opposite the anaesthetist. They smiled down at me. “A hand-joiner,” the anaesthetist commented. What was he implying, I wondered. My blanket had been removed, and not knowing what else to with my hands I had clasped them on my stomach. The anaesthetist patted my hands. “That’s good, very good,” he said reassuringly. “Some people clench their fists, bite their nails.” Nizar lifted the hem of my gown and squeezed my knee. I sniggered and was about to make a joke about sexual harassment when I passed out.
     
    When I came round, I was back in the two-bedded room but the Caribbean man had gone, nobody could tell me where. My right leg, swaddled in bandages, was as big as an elephant’s. Sally, who visited me on her way home from work, thought it looked very funny. As I anticipated, I got no sympathy when I described my morning. “Serves you right for queue-jumping,” she said. “My Auntie Emily has been waiting two years for a hip operation.” Nizar came in later and asked me to lift my leg gently a few inches off the bed. I did it very gently — gingerly, you might say — without adverse effect, and he seemed satisfied. “Jolly good,” he said, “spiffing.”
    After a few days on crutches, waiting for the swelling to subside, and several weeks of physiotherapy and controlled exercise to get the quadriceps back to strength, I started to get the same intermittent pain as before. Fuuuuuuckinell! I couldn’t believe it. Nizar couldn’t believe it either. He reckoned he’d identified the trouble — a bit of tissue called plica that was getting nipped in the knee joint — and cut it away. We watched the video of my operation together on the TV in his office. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to watch it before. It was a brightly lit, coloured, circular image, like looking through the porthole of a submarine with a powerful searchlight. “There it is, you see!” cried Nizar. All I could see was what looked like a slim silvery eel biting chunks out of the soft underside of a shellfish. The little steel jaws snapped viciously and fragments of my knee floated off to be sucked out by the aspirator. I couldn’t watch for long. I always was squeamish about violence on television.
    “Well?” I said, when Nizar switched off the video. “Well, frankly old bean, I’m baffled,” he said. “You saw for yourself the plica that was causing the trouble, and you saw me cut it away. There’s no evidence of torn meniscus or arthritic degeneration of the joint. There’s no bally reason why the knee should be giving you any more pain.”
    “But it is,” I said.
    “Yes, quite so. It’s jolly annoying.”
    “Particularly for me,” I said.
    “It must be idiopathic patella chondromalacia,” said Nizar. When I asked him to explain he said, “Patella chondromalacia means