behind the scenes: why I am such a huge honking disaster right now

tl;dr: I’m mentally and physically exhausted with pain and limitations to my life while I wait for hip-replacement surgery that is, at a minimum, months away. On top of all the other shit life has thrown at me the last few years…

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I was gonna write about this eventually, soon, but events a few days ago have forced my hand.

That sounds more dramatic than it is. But I am dealing with some shit, and even though I have always been a person who just sucks it up and doesn’t complain, I have reached my breaking point, and I am absolutely done with being a good girl who doesn’t dump her crap on other people. So please forgive me for being a little dramatic. I am at the end of a tether that has been fraying since *check notes* even before the pandemic knocked my mental health all out of whack. 2019 was a shitty year for me, and then I proactively made a big change — yay me, for getting off my ass and doing something! — that was gonna ensure that 2020 and beyond was so much better. But the universe decided to kick me in the gut anyway. (Fuck you, universe.)

Anyway, so this past Friday noontime, I headed off to a public multiplex showing of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest flick, Knock at the Cabin, which opened in both the US and UK this weekend. (I was not invited to a press screening, which is a rant for another day. 25 fucking years I’ve been doing this, and I still have to beg to see films in advance? Fuck that shit all to hell.) I was aiming at a multiplex less than two miles from my house, which normally would be an easy walk for me. A walk I would welcome, in fact, a walk I could do in less than half an hour, a walk that would give me the small cheap thrill of saving on bus fare, a walk that would give me the other small cheap thrill of burning some calories that I could then spend on, I dunno, crisps in the pub or something.

But I cannot engage in such small cheap thrills these days. Because my right hip is fucked.

It all started early in the pandemic, when — in an attempt to keep fit when I couldn’t go to the gym anymore — I tried my hand at “running” out in the wild. Like, in the local park. And by “running,” I mean, the slowest sort of jog-shuffle I could manage for a few seconds in between bouts of speed-walking. The day after the first time I did this, I had a godawful ache in my right glute. And maybe that’s all it was: a bit of overworking muscle screaming about being forced to do a bit of work it had not been asked to do since, I dunno, high school in the late 80s.

But then I started having a bit of weakness in that leg. That was in June 2020. I used Dr Google to self-diagnose a hip flexor strain, and found some exercises to fix that, which helped a little bit. But not enough. So by November 2020, when I was still dealing with pain and weakness and stiffness in that hip, I finally got a video consult with a physiotherapist — thank you, NHS! — who remotely diagnosed high hamstring tendinopathy. Fun fact: this is a really rare injury that affects primarily elite athletes and perimenopausal women. (Guess which one I am.) He gave me some exercises to fix that, which I did religiously. And they helped… slowly. So slowly. But by December 2021, I thought I was all healed up. I did a four-mile walk one day early that month during which, I realized only after the fact, I had had no pain at all. Hoorah!

This did not last. Just weeks later, by the very end of 2021, the pain and the weakness high in my right leg and in my butt — high hamstring tendinopathy is often characterized as a literal pain the ass — had returned. I doubled-down on my exercises, but there was not much improvement. Then, I had Covid in July 2022 and took ibuprofen for two weeks for the fever, and saw a subsequent (small) improvement in the hip pain with the drugs. This was the kick I needed to go back to the GP again to try to figure out what was going on. I got another physio appointment — this one in person. And the nice young man diagnosed osteoarthritis in my hip. Which made me cry! Because unlike with a hip flexor strain or high hamstring tendinopathy, this was, I knew, a diagnosis of a thing that was not going to get better.

The nice young man gave me more exercises. Which, again, I did religiously. And, again, they didn’t really help much.

Just weeks later again, my mom, back in New York, went into a hospital, with what turned out to be advanced cancer. Everyday from that point on was a nightmare. My two brothers — both still in the NYC area — were absolute champions, dealing with doctors and supporting my parents — and every time our group Messenger chat dinged with a new text, my heart stopped, anticipating the worst. After a few weeks of this, I knew I had to fly home: it had become obvious that treatment was not going to be an option for my mother, and that she was not going to get better. She died on the early hours of September 29th. I was at her bedside the day before. The whole week before. It was a week of watching her deteriorate dramatically by the day. It was a week of watching her die. It was awful. I am haunted by it. It was horrible. I will never recover from this.

So my mother died, and in retrospect it was obvious that she had been ill for a long time, and had done nothing about it. (The docs couldn’t even figure out where her primary cancer was, it had spread so far and so insidiously by the time one of my brothers convinced her she had to go to the hospital to get checked out.) She didn’t trust doctors: they “find something wrong with you” when you go to them. (I mean, yes, they do, if there’s something fucking wrong with you.) She also died not having lived the life she wanted to live. She had always made it clear to me, in the years before, during all the many many many times she had complained about her life, that she never regretted having kids. Which is something, I guess. (Yay for me and my lovely brothers not being a regret.) But she wanted more, and could have had some of it — that also became clear after she died, she and my dad had some money they could have spent on traveling and whatnot — but never made it happen.

I told myself I was not going to let this be me: I was going to take care of myself, and I was going to live my life to the fullest I could. I mean, I was already doing these things as much as possible (not having much money limits both to varying degrees). But I was newly inspired to not waste whatever time I have left.

Anyway, I returned to London after my mom’s funeral and the ton of admin that hits after someone dies, and after getting my dad settled into his new life, and after having to leave some of the unfinished work with my brothers. My hip issues had been getting worse, but now I was done with it. Where in the summer I had told the Nice Young Physio that I wanted to approach my hip osteoarthritis as conservatively as possible — it’s not that I don’t trust doctors, but some shit we deal with in our bodies can be managed in ways that do not require drugs or surgery — now I was all: We need to do whatever it takes to get me back to fighting trim. If a doc had told me amputating my leg would solve the problem, I would have agreed to it. Because I cannot take this anymore.

Thankfully, no one has said amputation is required. But a nice older, more experienced physio, even before she saw the X-ray that I finally was able to get, was like, “Yeah, your hip is fucked, and you’re gonna need a hip replacement.” (After the X-ray, she was like, “Yup, I was right.”) All the cartilage in my right hip is just… gone. Worn away. Was this caused by a hip flexor strain or a high hamstring tendinopathy? Or has it been the hip all along? When I ask anyone who should know, they just shrug. Osteoarthritis could be genetic. It could be related to my weight: I’ve been moderately overweight most of my life, between bouts of relative thinness, but I was close to an all-time poundage low when this began, so who knows? (Damage accumulates, though.)

So: I have a consultation with a surgeon regarding a hip replacement at the end of March. With the current state of the NHS (fucked, thanks to Tory underfunding over, basically, the entire time I have been living in the UK, so that’s cool), who knows how long beyond that I will have to wait for the actual surgery. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I will be able to get cut up and repaired sometime this summer. (There’s a new hip-replacement procedure that some surgeons are doing: it’s minimally invasive and you recover from it much quicker. I hope I’ll be a good candidate for that.)

For now, though, I am in pain pretty much all the time. If I’m moving, I hurt, whether that’s turning over in bed or walking even just a few steps. Sitting still is basically the only time I feel normal. Over-the-counter painkillers take the edge off, just a bit, but not much. Where before I would walk for miles without even thinking about it, barely even noticing it, now I dread shuffling out to the bus stop around the corner. Stairs are… not fun. (Boy, am I discovering how inaccessible London can be.)

It’s all exhausting. The pain is physically exhausting. Feeling like I’m practically housebound is mentally exhausting. It’s so much work just trying to get out of the house. (I can barely bend over to put a sock and a shoe on my right foot.) I feel vulnerable when I do get out and about, like I’m gonna be easy pickin’s for a mugger. It takes so much longer to get anywhere. And more expensive: I’ve taken more taxis in the past couple of months than I have in years.

Just as the world was starting to open up again, just a little bit, since the pandemic shut everything down, I am now even more limited than I have been since early 2020. (During our lockdowns, I could at least go out for a nice long walk.) Since March 2020, I have missed my old city life tremendously. And I still cannot have it back.

What does this have to do with M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin? Well, on Friday morning, even though I was dreading the physical activity it would require, I hauled myself out to the bus stop for the short ride to that multiplex. Then I limped on my crutch, bone grinding on bone with every step, into the shopping mall where the multiplex is, over to the far corner where two long escalators would take me up to the cinema, across the wide lobby, in something close to agony the whole time. But at least I’d soon be sitting down for a couple of hours!

Except that was not to be. Because the movie hadn’t finished downloading from the studio ether that movies come from these days, and no one could say when it would be done. So the showing I was there to see — the first of the day — would not be going ahead. Which is absurd. There could not be a more you-had-one-job scenario than this, and yet…

Friends, I wanted to cry. Not only from the pain, but from the frustration. It’s seems like such a small, stupid thing, but small, stupid things are huge and arduous for me right now.

The last four years have been one endless slow-motion crumbling of my spirit: a horrible living situation (that’s the thing I had fixed by January 2020), the pandemic, Trump and the Tories destroying the US and the UK, catching Covid, my mother dying, and now my own body betraying me. Every time — every damn time — I have thought, Okay, that’s it, that was the last straw, I simply cannot take any more, the universe would throw another straw on the pile. And now I am like this damn hip: all the cushioning is gone. I have no resilience left. No reserves. None.

I need the biggest damn break possible. And that’s not going to happen.

Anyway, this is what I have been going through in the past months and years, and this is why I am having so much trouble getting back into gear. I’m simply… worn down to nothing.

Oh, and I might try to get to Knock at the Cabin this coming week. Or maybe I’ll just wait till it’s on premium VOD by the end of the month, as it surely will be. I won’t have to leave the house for that…