Aches & Pains by Maeve Binchy

that hung over the bed and was meant to develop your arm muscles, I suppose. For those who used it, I suppose it did.
    I just snuggled down and read more and more books. Then I was cured and went home.
    I am no role model for anyone. I did not do all the horrific exercise they demanded. I just hate the thought of my lungs filling up with all that air and oxygen and everything if it means I have to walk vigorously every day.
    But for more than two years I have had no pain whatsoever. I can manage stairs and airports and corridors and I have sleep-filled nights. To me this is reward enough to make me advise anyone else to have the operation.
    I know that when my next hip needs replacing I will go in there like a lamb. I will always celebrate the leap of faith in those who knew that arthritis was not just malingering. It was debilitating, destructive and not at all part of a so-called natural ageing process. Their foresight and skills in this area will be forever celebrated.

SOME AMAZINGLY FATTENING
THINGS TO EAT
     
    Fried bread
    Roast goose with a lot of skin
    Tiramisu
    Peanut butter sandwich with banana and jam
    Sausage roll
    Digestive biscuits almost hidden by pâté
    Any dessert called ‘Special Chocolate Plate’

WHEN IT IS REALLY SERIOUS
     
    I had a friend who was told out of a clear blue sky that he had only three more months to live. Since he was someone who had a fair chance of about twenty or even thirty more years, the shock for him and his many friends was overwhelming.
    But he was the one who handled it extremely well, it was the friends who floundered. Some were literally unable to face it at all. They feared going to see him lest they break down and make things worse, if that were possible.
    Some came with false hopes and cures. There was much confident talk of the power of crystals, the hands of a healer, the lichen that grew on some rock in the desert. Some came with stories of magnificent surgeons in this city or in that medical centre.
    Some sent holding letters, full of vague generalitiesabout not losing hope and promising a visit they never intended to make. Some – and these, he found, were the saddest – sent him little Get Well cards with pictures of bunny rabbits weeping into a handkerchief and saying ‘So sorry to hear that you’re sick’.
    The other kind of card he got fairly regularly was a jolly vulgar one, with sexual innuendo or bedpan humour and cheerful bluff messages inside saying something like ‘Come on now, mate, we are counting on you to beat this’.
    And as he lived out his three months calmly he did not rail against those with the inability to say goodbye. He said that until it happened to him he would have done more or less the same, apart from the bunnies crying into the handkerchiefs.
    He said that he wasn’t at all living twenty-four hours a day in fear and terror of what will, in any event, happen to us all sometime, but in his particular case would happen within a given and short period of time. Having some notice gave you a chance to take stock, he said, and forced you to do those things you had been intending to do for years.
    He went to see the Grand Canyon, and stood and watched three magical sunsets there without self-pity because even without his diagnosis, he said, he would probably not have gone back again anyway. He tidied up all his affairs, wrote to public figures whom he had admired. He gave his books and pictures away to people who might like them.
    He was low sometimes, but never frightened, andhe claimed that he didn’t waste one of his eighty-four days on useless regrets. He said the very best thing people could do for him was to visit him at home and give the one obligatory acknowledgement of regret that he was about to die so soon. He said you needed that much, otherwise the conversation was entirely artificial and everyone was in some kind of denial. After that you left it.
    He loved people to talk about the world that he had lived in, the people they