En Passant: Hip, hip, hurrah!

I REMEMBER years and years ago, when there were only videos, no DVDs, that there were two video hire shops in town – J&J’s run by Dawn High, and Milrays’s run by ol’ Steyn Humphreys. Milray’s was where Debonairs Pizza now operates, and J&J was in the now-closed arcade that ran between President Street and the existing Checkers parking lot.

Ag, man, you remember that arcade – the first shop was Vermaak’s Electrical which was actually on President Street, opposite Alexis Tearoom on the other side of the road, then J&J Video, then a couple of smaller shops, then a hair salon called Kim’s, then a shop that fixed cash registers and at the top was a wholesale jeweller and a pet shop. Stallions bar was once there and so was a sex shop!

Anyway, I remember that friends of mine hired what they thought was a thought-provoking, award-winning video, and we sat down to watch it and the video shop had put the wrong tape in the cover so we watched Robocop instead, the very first Robocop movie, and I thought it was great!

Now, Robocop of course was not the first film to feature a bionic man, and there have been plenty of them since, but I think we sometimes forget that body-part replacement is now fairly commonplace, if not on the scale of Robocop.

This occurred to me last week after I’d popped into the Spoeg & Spittle for a small one, and the subject of hip replacements cropped up. You might think this is an unlikely subject in a bar where traditionally men talk about Heyneke Meyer and rugby, the petrol price, Pamela Anderson’s cleavage and Landrover differentials. Trust me, at a certain age subjects change (although opinions about Heyneke Meyer don’t), and among older geysers hip replacements is a topic of interest.

OK, so having a hip replacement does not make you Robocop, but I don’t know anyone who’s had a replacement who doesn’t say that the results have been marvellous, if not conducive to crime fighting à la Robocop.

If I think about it, I suppose that the first body-part replacement that I ever heard about, when I was a child, was the wooden leg that pirates (aargh!) traditionally cluncked around with. I don’t think I have ever actually seen someone with a wooden leg, a real wooden leg. Mind you, I don’t think I have ever seen a pirate (aargh!) either.

Then, also, I do remember being told as a child that someone had a glass eye. I have now no idea who it was, but I have always accepted that such an orb really exists.

I was surprised to learn that they’ve been doing hip replacements for well over 100 years, initially, as I understand it, to replace femur heads that had been ravaged by tuberculosis. It was a bloke called Gluck who recorded the first attempt back in 1891 in Germany, can you believe, just seven years after Vryheid was founded.

As far as I know Gluck, whose first name was Themistocles, for which I don’t suppose he ever forgave his parents, has nothing to do with the dorp south of Vryheid called Glückstadt.

Ol’ Themistocles used ivory for the femur head, the ball at the top, which fits into the socket in the hip. I’m not sure how successful the operation was but they no longer use ivory, which a lot of elephants are thankful for.

But it was a while before they hit upon the ideal materials for the femur head and the socket. Glass can be incredibly smooth, and it was used briefly in the 1920s as a fitted cup (these are my words, hey, not medical jargon) over the femoral head, but the glass shattered under the pressures of body on leg. I dunno, if you think about it I suppose there’s a fair bit of pressure on the hip even if you’re not participating in the 400 metres hurdles at the World Champs.

They tried ceramics, stainless steel and various alloys, and as I understand it, they eventually arrives at a metal ball and a polyethylene socket, which apparently has a desirable low-friction property, which makes sense. I mean, you don’t want your hip to squeak like the garden gate with each step you take. And there ain’t no way that you can get into the joint with a squirt of Three-in-One or Q10.

Hip replacements are now a common procedure, happening I imagine every day at our bigger hospitals. I cannot find any figures for how many are done here in a year, but I did see one figure for the USA that said that 332,000 were done just in that country in a year.

They can replace hips, knees and boomps a daisy… be serious, John… they can replace hips, knees, ankles in the furniture business… and the other joints of wrists, shoulders and elbows. But it don’t come cheap.

The figures I’ve seen and heard for the cost of a hip replacement are astounding. Banks have a special word for overdrafts for these ops – it’s called a Joint Account!