Aches & Pains by Maeve Binchy Page A

when I was glum with despair.
    It worked so well that some people said there was nothing at all wrong with me, except that I seemed for some reason to be bent double, walking on twosticks, yelping a bit and unable to climb three steps. Others, who knew there was quite a bit more to it, realised that this was the way I wanted to play it and went along with it. So not only did I see good humour and optimism reflected in the faces I looked at, which was immensely cheering, but the approach worked when I was alone. I had said so often that I was great I almost believed it myself. And on the odd day when I really did need the shoulder to wail on I felt I could ask for it because it wasn’t already sodden with the damp of a thousand wails.
    I admit that after the operation, I didn’t want people to be brisk and dismissive either, saying ‘Nonsense, there’s nothing to it’, when they stood there on their two good legs and I had a contraption tied to me to make sure I didn’t lie on my side by accident. I didn’t want them to minimise it, and say that everyone, including the dogs in the street, were having these joint replacements all the time these days.
    And I certainly didn’t like being offered the healing power of crystals, the address of a seventh son of a seventh son, a pounded mixture of herbs to apply to the afflicted part, a copper anklet or a mantra never known to fail.
    What
did
I want then?
    I suppose like anyone I wanted to be treated with concern and affection, but most of all to be treated as if things were normal, as they had once been, and would be again not so very far in the future.
    If that’s what you want, how do you get people totreat you like that? The good news is that it’s the invalid who calls the shots. All we have to do if we want to avoid sepulchral sympathy, remorseless heartiness or off-the-wall cures – whichever is most maddening – is to send out the right vibes.
    I’m not at all suggesting we ignore symptoms, refuse treatment and abandon everything that modern medicine can do for us. Absolutely the contrary. We should seek advice early and then take it. We should rejoice that we live after rather than during the days of leeches and bleedings and dosing with unmentionable things. If ever there was a reason not to mourn the passing of the good old days, it would be in terms of health.
    Nor is this book about putting on a show for the visitor. It’s about coming to terms with the fact that our bodies are not invincible after all; realising that we are not toddlers who have fallen over and will get up ten seconds later to waddle on.
    It’s only human to be anxious and doubtful and sometimes just outraged that parts of us aren’t working properly. We vow that if only this pain or that ache would go then we will never complain again. We spend futile hours looking back on a misspent life and blaming ourselves for whatever has befallen us.
    This is natural. There’s really no such thing as a naturally good patient. Who is able to be genuinely good-tempered through wheezes and snuffles and fractures and labour pains and attacks of nausea? But eventually, we probably learn to be slightly betterpatients than we feel like being. Partly for social survival, but partly for sheer self-preservation, we learn to cheer up.
    I hope that there is something in this book that will cheer you up. Not too boisterously, as if a manic face were two inches from yours saying menacingly, ‘You will be good-humoured or else’. I have met too many professional Pollyannas in my life to think that good humour can be imposed on people successfully.
    And I hope nothing in this book will suggest that it was written and illustrated by two people with a huge history of courage and stoicism. In fact, the next time either of us are poorly, we may well have to consult ourselves here to recall why we were so over-confident as to produce a manual advising all around us on attitude and behaviour.
    But it is written with