My Fight Against Osteo-Arthritis

By Eve Orme

'Osteo-arthritis does not kill, it merely tortures. It seems often to attack those people who have led active lives, and are otherwise the most healthy. Perhaps this is why one sees so many sufferers among the very old, and perhaps too, there is some mythical justice which forces the otherwise healthy to learn fortitude and patience through suffering.' This is a frank, and at times amusing, account of the 20 year long suffering of the author, and her methods of overcoming the debilitating effects of osteo-arthritis. She makes it clear that she has not found a cure, but has found relief through treatment and exercises, hoping that this book will provide useful information for fellow sufferers, and will encourage others who are not yet suffering to such a degree, to seek early treatment. Contents Include: The Beginning The Advance of the Enemy The Quack Faith-Healing National Health Crisis How I Gained Relief Compensation

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hesperides Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528761260

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Preface

Osteo-arthritis does not kill, it merely tortures. It seems often to attack those people who have led active lives, and are otherwise the most healthy. Perhaps this is why one sees so many sufferers among the very old, and perhaps too, there is some mystical justice which forces the otherwise healthy to learn fortitude and patience through suffering.

I want to make it clear that I write only from my own experience. Those readers who say to themselves, But those are not my symptoms! must forgive me, for I write only of what I know, which is osteo-arthritis of the hips. On the other hand I feel that much of what is applicable to hip-sufferers must be applicable to those who have the disease in other joints. I write from the point of view of the sufferer, and with no medical knowledge, and mainly because when answering the many letters which came to me after my recorded broadcasts from the B.B.C. I felt that to deal with each letter thoroughly I would have to write a short book.

If I seem egotistical in telling the whole story of my fight from its beginning, I hope I may be forgiven. I tell it because so many correspondents asked, Did you have this symptom—or that? How long have you had the disease? What efforts had you previously made to be rid of it? Also because, having had osteo-arthritis for the past twenty years (which is a much longer time than most of my correspondents) and having been able, through treatment and exercises, to rid myself of pain and lameness, I hope my story may encourage others. But let me say firmly that I have found no cure.

I should be taking far too much upon myself, and with no justification for doing so, were I to attempt to advise those unfortunates whose freedom of movement has almost completely left them in the combating of their disease through physical exercises. All I can hope for is that they may find something heartening in this short book which is mainly directed towards those women who, while still on their feet, are struggling to run a home while handicapped by pain and stiffness. It is directed towards those who have been told by their doctors to Keep going, which is what we must all do as far as possible, and also towards those in whom the disease is as yet not far advanced, in order that they may be encouraged, by what were my own mistakes, to have early treatment.

I

The Beginning

The beginning of my trouble was barely noticeable. In bed sometimes there would be pain in my legs; sometimes down the front of them, sometimes down the back, and then the line of pain would end in the calf with a sensation of a hot poker drilling into it. The pains were of the Tooth-ache variety, the kind that are sometimes called Growing-pains in childhood.

The first signs came to me when still a young woman in India where my husband was serving in the Royal Artillery. I had always looked upon myself as being extremely healthy. I enjoyed life enormously; danced, played tennis, rode. Childbirth had never caused me any trouble, and I had never been subject to any ordinary feminine discomforts.

I know that with some people the enemy arrives, is there, and within a year or so, crippledom is the result, but with me it was not so. His approach was slow and subtle. It was quite a time before I realized that I was losing a certain freedom of movement in my legs. Yet, in many ways I was still supple. I could, for instance, touch my toes without bending my knees with the greatest of ease, and I was said to be a very good dancer. I was also a believer in Physical jerks. I would often stand, my feet apart, and swing downwards from side to side to touch my toes. For a long time I could do this with ease, but the first symptom of the disease (I know now) was that the spread of my feet apart was not as wide as it once had been.

Even after the night pains had started (they were so slight that I took very little notice of them) I went, two years running, to Ladakh in Lesser Tibet with my husband on a shooting expedition. About this I wrote long ago in a book called Mountain Magic from which it is clear (as a good deal of it was taken from diaries kept at the time) that the pain did not incommode me, even though our journeyings were made on foot and pony, and even though conditions at that high altitude were fairly rigorous.

When his tour of duty in India was over, my husband was ordered home and we went to live in an Army quarter near Aldershot.

Soon the enemy began to make his presence felt more clearly. It struck me as odd that what I called my Bit of rheumatism or my stiffness, could not be worked off. Other people I knew, who were sometimes stiff after the first game of tennis of the season, would feel less stiff by the end of a set on the following day. But not I. All the exercise I took, even a walk, would make me stiffer. Gardening was the worst of all. I had only to work for an hour or so weeding to find that after resting by sitting in a chair it was painful to rise from it again. But still I did not imagine that there was anything very serious the matter with me.

And then, I was forced to face the issue. In the Royal Regiment of Artillery, in those days, an officer was entitled to a Charger which was kept and fed at government expense. Should he own yet another horse, there was fodder and stabling for that one too, so I used to hunt. I was never a first-class horsewoman or anything approaching it, but I enjoyed riding. In India I had always ridden astride. Now I found that I could no longer get right down in my saddle, so I bought a second-hand side-saddle and gave up riding astride.

I was out after one of the first meets of the season, and put my horse at a fence still covered with growth in which neither he nor I saw wire. It was there, however, and we came a cropper. Someone caught and held my horse and I picked myself up unhurt. (At least, I thought so.) My stirrup leather had broken, and I thought it useless to follow hounds any longer, so turned my horse for home. We had a five-mile hack in pouring rain and by the time we arrived I was stiff and sodden. On dismounting I found that I was lame. Naturally this did not worry me. I applied my usual panacea for stiffness, a very hot mustard bath.

This increased stiffness did not, however, leave me, even for a moment, as stiffness before my fall had sometimes done. It ruined the whole of the following summer for me, although, even with it, I had been able to ride for the rest of the preceding winter, during which I had kept telling myself that I had strained a ligament or torn a tendon.

If anyone feels inclined to ask the question, Why did you not go to a doctor during all this time? I can only answer that the pain was slight. It nagged, made me sometimes a little lame; sometimes what I called my bad leg would feel as if it were about to give way under me, and that was all. I could still dance—in fact dancing pained me far less than some other activities—and