After 1st hip replacement day 23 - after 2nd. hip op. day 2

Hi to all,
Well, as you know we are back in hospital in Chennai at the SRM Institutes for Medical Science (Asian Joint Reconstruction Institute). Jean had her operation to replace her right hip on Monday and the surgeon Dr. Vijay Bose said it was a perfect result - just like the 1st. one. So, that is reassuring. And he also said that this hip was quite a bit worse than the 1st one with complete cartilage loss and severe pitting of the bone surfaces and bone on bone. No wonder it was painful. Anyway they had her walking down in Recovery before she came back upstairs. However, the first 24-36 hour period is always the worst and she had an uncomfortable night with a certain amount of pain and lack of sleep. Then today (Tues.) the Physio was here and again she was out of bed and the pain was worse, but he assured us that the pain would subside faster with exercise, even if the exercise itself was somewhat excruciating. Seems like being cruel to be kind but hard to go through with at the time. Still, it does help, having been through it before and knowing what to expect. As always the nurses are very kind and competent and always do their best to make Jean comfortable. They were pleased to see Jean again, even if she might be the patient from hell!! She's not very patient! There is one thing that Dr. Bose has assured us of and that is that they operation itself cannot be damaged. The ceramic prostheses are virtually indestructible and even the muscle and ligament re-attachments are foolproof. Good to remember this when enduring pain in the recovery phase.
We are in the Raffles Suite on the 5th, floor where we were before, although this time we have a much larger corner room with views in 2 directions. However, the views are hardly salubrious - a commercial building roof in one direction and the building site construction camp that we overlooked before in the other.
When we left the Quality Inn, we said we'd be back in a week or so and they've offered to upgrade us to a bigger room at no extra cost. One of the staff in the restaurant said they'd all be praying for Jean. On the one hand it's a nice thought but on the other sounds like they think there's a real chance they might not see her again!
On this visit we've only seen a very small part of India compared to Jean's first visit here 13 years ago when she spent 5 months backpacking in the north. Then she visited Mumbai, Pune, Rishikesh, Dharamsala, Delhi, as well as a few other places Jim can't at the moment recall. By contrast Jim has only been to Delhi for 3 weeks which included a quick visit to Agra and the Taj Mahal. All unforgettable experiences.
Chennai is mostly an unremarkable city of 6 million people. The terrain is overwhelmingly flat and the buildings mostly nondescript. Some strikingly large and impressive ones though and some pleasantly leafy avenues. Some attractive Indian style 2 story houses which one could fantasise about living in, but then one thinks of the practicalities of living with little local knowledge in Chennai! There are many large housing developments going on all the time - some very upmarket apartments in complexes with swimming pools and tennis courts. The traffic is chaotic, although nowhere near what Jim remembered of Delhi 9 years ago. On that note we read a horrifying statistic in the local paper a few days ago - apparently 380 people are killed EVERY DAY on India's roads. That's a planeload of people every day! Not sure whether that's believable but that's what the paper said. God knows how many are injured. The human cost and suffering to say nothing of the financial cost can only be imagined. They talk of improvements to the roading infrastucture, enforcement and licensing but nothing moves quickly in India!!
At least Chennai is clean - no knee deep paper rubbish as you see in Delhi. Chennai is definitely not pedestrian friendly and being a pedestrian, much less a partially disabled one as Jean is at present, is fraught with difficulty. In Asia generally footpaths are to put it mildly, not of a high standard, but India takes the cake. In many places there is no footpath at all and you are in there with the motorbikes which show no mercy. In other places the footpaths are about 12" (30 cms) above the road and narrow and obstructed with - you name it. Broken manhole covers, piles of earth and stones and street hawkers all add to the mix.
However, in spite of all that, one does get a strong feeling of intense commercial energy which will propel India way beyond her earlier conventional limits. There are ads for new cars all over the place including well known luxury brands. Just seen an ad for a new Volkswagen beetle for Rs. 21.32 lakh. One lakh = 100,000 so the price is Rs. 2,132,000 which is NZD42,984 - probably not much different from NZ. Another unit of numerical measurement is the crore. One crore (pronounced "karor") = 10,000,000. Guess you have to have these units of measurement when one rupee is worth so little. But, although labour rates in India remain comparatively low, India still does suffer from high inefficiency levels. A lot of this inefficiency is due to the black market which is still huge and which makes the collection of meaningful data very difficult. And the entrenched class system is still there with nurses for example refusing to touch more menial tasks which are passed down to "nurse helpers". However, compared to China it has a demographic advantage in that it has a big proportion of its population under 35, whereas China has a rapidly ageing population. Anecdotally we heard of a female Indian patient in this hospital whose sheet had slipped off her. A cleaner who happened to be in the room at the time pulled the sheet back into place, but the patient ordered her out and demanded that the sheet be replaced because it had been "contaminated"!!
On the subject of China, the Chinese President is due here tomorrow (Wed.). Don't know how cordial the visit will be but if China thinks they can indulge in a bit of browbeating the way they did recently with Vietnam over disputed territory in the South China Sea, they'd better think again. India has just signed a cooperation agreement with Vietnam to counter Chinese aggression in Vietnam's and other countries' waters in the S. China Sea. This agreement includes the supply of naval vessels.
The Indians are very distrustful of China and with good reason. India is expanding its military forces at a great rate to keep up with China's expansion which is all very worrying. China's overall policy is AGGRESSION, both military and financial, and anyone in NZ who lives in a fanatsy cloud cuckoo land believing anything to the contrary needs to get out more.
And something else on the subject of politics - that of NZ's. We have been bemused and horrified at the continuing tales of underhand sleazy politics just about every day in the NZ Herald and the continuing efforts of that noble organ of journalistic probity to continue to undermine legitimate criticism of the current government. While there may be legitimate argument on both sides, we believe that there has been sufficient exposure of corrupt behaviour to say "there's no smoke without fire". And there is no real democracy when those tactics are indulged in by any government. To that end we cannot bear the thought of another 3 years of a right wing National/ACT coalition and so we are channeling our votes (already cast) in another direction - NZ First. They are a centrist party and hold out the only hope of an effective brake on right wing covert spying and financially destructive policies which will see the complete selloff of NZ completed in their next term. We are keeping our fingers crossed for NZ's sake that a balanced government is the outcome of Saturday's general election.
Well, that's enough ranting for one day - we'll keep you up to date as to Jean's progress and when we can finally return to Thailand.
Hope all is well with everyone out there.........
Lots of love from us,
Jean and Jim
Chennai
INDIA.

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