Daniel Etherington

Said the consultant in King’s College Hospital’s orthopaedic department, a place I’ve been visiting on and off the past few years.

I’ve been having what many people of a certain age, and I’d guess particularly tall people who like running, or sports, experience – knee problems. In New Zealand a few years ago, I started getting knee issues. I’d had them before, and they’d usually fading away, so I assumed this would be a similar case. But no. And by the time I got home to the UK, I was having a lot of pain and even “giving way” issues, where the knee suddenly buckled. Running was obviously out, and even getting up to the bus stop at the top of the road was painful for a while. So I got into the system, asking a GP, getting referred to a sports clinic injury, getting an MRI, and finally seeing a consultant at King’s, who, after a bizarre aside about the dangers of cycling in London, told me I had tears to the meniscal cartilage – the shock absorbing disc between the knee and the tibia (shinbone). Joy.

The pain subsided, however, so I opted out of surgery for a year or so. Things didn’t improve though, so I got back onto the surgical list, and a few weeks ago had a keyhole arthroscopy at the King’s Day Surgery. Keyhole surgery – what amazing technology. Although I was put out with a general anaesthetic, I was able to walk out with the aid of just one crutch afterwards, and within a few days, most of the swelling was gone, and I only had an ache, not pain.

At this point, I’d like to say -  Thanks NHS. You might keep me sitting around in waiting rooms for hours on occasion, you rarely seem to answer the phone, some of your facilities look a bit knackered, and it wasn’t exactly helpful that the surgeon told me what he’d done mere minutes after I woke up and was still in cookoo land, or that nurse couldn’t read his writing to explain any better, but thanks to my taxes and your staff, I got my knee done. The op was around the same time many people in the US and UK were slagging off the NHS, in the on-going debate over Obama’s proposed reforms. Well, all I can say is that I doubt any of those people doing the slagging were poor (they mostly seemed to be Tory or Republican politicians). I’m self-employed, I don’t earn a great deal, and there’s no way I could have afforded surgery privately. So stuff you, critics of the NHS. Hands off. New Labour might be doing a good job of continuing the undermining of the welfare state started by their Tory predecessors, but it’s a great idealogical insitution that needs preserving. Society should take care of itself, by way of taxes, and the NHS is a great, ongoing example of that.

Anway, back to today and my follow-up appointment. The worried look came when the consultant was explaining again about my op, and what had been done to my knee. Specifically it came with her use of the word “osteoarthritis”, something nobody had bothered to mention to me before. Now, I realise that at 39, I’m probably past the life expectancy of a homo sapien were I wandering the savanna millennial ago and living a more realistic life as as part of the nature of things. But living in modern Britain as I do, I’m only about midway through the male life expectancy. I do have other 40-ish friends with arthritis, but it’s more something I associate with an older generation; for example, it’s something that started troubling both my parents in their sixties. “Don’t look so worried.” I guess I looked worried, in part, as I’m ignorant about osteoarthritis, alongside that little matter of no one mentioning it before, and a GP friend who also had a knee arthroscopy telling me his knees were fully back to business afterwards, so I was semi expecting something like that.

“Osteoarthritis usually develops in people who are over 50 years of age, and it is more common in women than in men” So says the intro to the condition on the NHS site. Darn. I’m neither of those things. “It is commonly thought that osteoarthritis is an inevitable part of getting older, but this is not true. Younger people can also be affected by osteoarthritis, often as a result of an injury or another joint condition.” Ok. In my case, she told me not to worry too much, as it was minor. The only thing she specifically told me to avoid was marathon running. I missing running, but I never planned to do a marathon, so I guess that’s ok. Still a bugger though – you see all those older people running marathons, Jimmy Saville and the like. It’s a bit of a mean twist of fate my knees are ropey in my 30s, and theirs are still going (presumably) strong. I can’t help but worry, a bit, despite the consultant’s reassurances.