4. What Shall We Try Next?

After leaving college I spent a year on the dole, then I got a job with the Metropolitan Police as a computer programmer.

It’s funny how things work out as I’d always vowed never to be an office worker. Still, I found programming to be quite a lot of fun.

My knee was still troubling me and I was still going to outpatients’ appointments and in 1980 Mr. M. decided to try another operation, ‘Arthroscopy’ which is just having a look and he decided it wasn’t bad enough to do anything else, as it would get better within about 5 years.

I might add that I got the nutter again during this stay in hospital but this stay wasn’t anywhere near as entertaining as the previous time. Except for the evening after my operation when I was still woozy.

I had lots of visitors: my mum, my brother, my sister and her husband and 2 workmates. Unfortunately, I was virtually ignored as my mum spent the whole time talking to my workmates, my brother was on the phone dropping the contents of his pipe onto my bed and my sister and her husband had an argument during which she punched the bed so I asked her not to do that as it hurt and she said sorry which was the only word said to me during the whole visiting time.

Visiting Time

You look forward to it all the day

When it arrives no one knows what to say

They start by asking you how you feel

And what you ate for your last meal

What you did with the physioterrorist

And what’s happening on the TV soaps you’ve missed.

They want to know what the doctor said.

And what’s wrong with the people in the other beds.

I stopped seeing Mr. M. for a while until some friends got fed up with me moaning about my knee hurting and made me go back to him (this was in about 1986). He treated me like an idiot, possibly because there were students in the room and he felt I’d failed him by not getting better after all his efforts.

He finished by saying that it would get better eventually, as he had never seen a grandmother with the condition. I felt like saying that maybe I should go straight out and get pregnant.