Haidee Marsh

I was 58 when a surgeon finally put a new hip in my right side. By then I had been limping for the better part of two years, sleeping badly, and quietly shrinking my life around a joint that had simply worn out. Osteoarthritis is the dull clinical name for it. What it felt like was losing pieces of myself one ordinary thing at a time: the long walk, the easy stairs, the shoe I could no longer reach to tie.

The hard part beforehand was not finding facts. It was finding a plain, ordered, human account of what actually lay ahead, from someone who had been through it rather than performed it. So I kept notes through the whole thing and turned them into this. How I knew it was finally time. What the operation and the first strange weeks were genuinely like. The precautions, the exercises that mattered, the setbacks no leaflet dwells on, and the slow ordinary miracle of walking without thinking about it again.

Health by Haidee is that account, set down in order. Orthopaedic surgeon Ms Priya Raman checks everything on the medical side so the figures and the cautions are right. I am not a clinician. I am someone who left it too long and came out the other side, and I would like you going in better prepared, and a little less frightened, than I was.