But yes, I had a couple of good days at work, I managed to go shopping in town without it being a hideous chore and I walked to and from the supermarket – about 1/4 mile each way – and it was only on the way back that I started to struggle. The worst bit was that I don’t seem to have any lift in my thigh right now, so walking uphill involves a weird, loping, sloping kind of gait to make any progress.

The magical curry that we had contained turmeric and ginger and a whole host of other yummy spices. There is a possibility they contributed to my miracle cure, however short-lived it was. Research suggests that these spices do indeed have anti-inflammatory properties, which is good, because I almost constantly crave curry. My favourite is mutta paneer (curries peas and cheese for the uninitiated). Cutting out dairy means I can’t have it anymore, but I think I will attempt (or more likely ask Leo to attempt) to make something similar with tofu.

Anyway, I had three or so good days, when I whizzed about at work and managed to survive a whole shift without our lovely cleaner asking me if I was ok and trying to make me sit down. She’s incredibly caring but does sometimes make me feel like I’ve got something terminal rather than just a pain. Ongoing, and at times hideous pain, but pain that’s mostly treatable to an extent, rather than something that could potentially kill me.

I wonder if there’s a link between curry and relentless optimism, because if so I think I need some soon.

So, where are we up to? Well, the diet thing is going surprisingly well. I have treated myself to some expensive 80% cocoa chocolate and therefore feel slightly deprived than I di, and I haven’t drunk any alcohol for exactly two weeks now. That in itself is a bit of a milestone, bearing in mind my fondness for the stuff and my genetic heritage and so forth. It’s strange, when you have an ongoing physical problem – it doesn’t matter whether it’s a headache or a hangover or dysentery or whatever – but you suddenly find your focus narrows acutely and you become very much in tune with your body and its actions and reactions. I can distinguish many different types of pain now, in much the same way, I imagine, that the Eskimos allegedly distinguish between thirty three different types of snow. Today I’m mostly having shin splint pain. The hip itself is quite mobile. In fact the hip itself has been good for a few days now. I managed a shopping trip round town yesterday where I was convinced I was walking ‘normally’ (ie in such a manner that no-one behind me would confuse me with someone from the Ministry of Funny Walks). It was only after nearly two hours that I started to ache.

But yes, the diet is mostly OK. I also seem to have lost about half a stone, which apart from being a small style and fashion victory also means that’s seven pounds less weight my joints are having to carry. I’m still taking the vast array of supplements; I do have small internal battles with myself about the fact that I’m ostensibly a vegetarian and yet I’m taking a variety of fish-based products but at the moment my mobility and my health has to take precedence. We have been eating lots of quinoa and beans and seeds, and I feel good.

Also, I discovered Arthritis Care and have volunteered my services for their magazine and to talk to the press and do live Tv interviews if anything vaguley arthritis-related makes the headlines. I will be the posterchild for the mobility-deficient. Kerry, my housemate, has given me a natty walking stick that she found in the lost property at her shop, so I am teaching myself not only to wlak elegantly with this but also to strike natty poses which might look good if they decide to stick me in Vogue or something.

Right. I am being harassed by children with hairballs now, so alas I must sign off. Cashew roast for tea. Yum.

And of course I was right. My new diet forbids me to eat wheat or potatoes or dairy or tomatoes or just about anything else nice or tasty or yummy that you could possibly think of. I’m not allowed red meat either, but being a vegetablarian that’s less of a loss, really. Anyway, I went to the healthfood store and bought quinoa and soya milk and tons of vegetables and so far we have devised two recipes that were actually very tasty. Last night’s was Green Supreme, basically a risotto-esque concoction with lots of green vegetables and toasted seeds, and it was yum. We did seem quite gaseous afterwards, though. In fact, I was so gaseous that Leo could hear me being gaseous in the bath whilst she was downstairs in the kitchen. Ahem.

I was under the impression that cutting out wheat and sugar and stuff reduced one’s propensity to flatulence, but apparently not. We’ve had a week off work this week, and we’ve been entertaining ourselves by watching tv programmes featuring people whose suffering is greater than ours. The Diet Doctors have been the best purveyors of such fun – these two middle-aged, middle class, shining and glossy professionals systematically annihilate the lifestyles of the fat and the sweaty in their shining and glossy clinic and then make them eat roots and berries to decongest their bunged up colons. Everyone loses weight, gains energy and loses all their unsightly skin conditions as quickly as you can say ‘colonic irrigation.’ So when I realised I was going to have to submit myself to the same kind of punsihing regime I thought I knew what to expect. Sadly, I think I am single-handedly responsible for a hole in the ozone layer over Aberystwyth and also probably to blame for this weekend’s glorious sunshine thanks to strangely localised global warming over my estate.

On the plus side, I have actually felt better today. I’ve been springier and bouncier and able to walk up the stairs placing one foot in front of the other, rather than doing one at a time. I even managed a few ascents without using the bannisters. Go me, eh? In fact, this afternoon I actually donned my pink cowboy hat and danced round the living room pretending to be Madonna on Live Earth yesterday. I have to admit I’ve watched her singing with Eugene and Serge from Gogol Bordello on YouTube about fifty million times today, largely because it was the funniest, most Eurovision-esque thing I’ve seen in years. Anyway, I’m sure you’re all bored of it by now, so instead, here’s a clip of Eugene Hutz singing the same song in the back of someone’s car. Whilst it’s going along. Genius stuff.

But yes, getting back to the point, dancing in the gypsy punk-stylee in one’s living room is not so good for one’s mobility, especially when said mobility is already impaired by degenerative diseases, so consequently I’ve been hobbling a bit this evening. But lovely Leo has promised me that she will give me a nice massage later, which she did last night. The muscles around my glutes and quads have been much looser and more relaxed today. In addition, I’ve been learning range-of-movement exercises from the magnificent expertvillage.com and Leo’s been picking up Swedish massage tips.

Gosh, I’m spoilt. Later on I’ll have another hot bath, with some salt in. I was hoping to have Epsom Salts, but my friend who was buying them for me forgot what they were called and ended up asking the pharmacist for ‘some salts that begin with an E, for someone with some kind of ailment.’ She returned from the supermarket with a box of Eno’s Liver Salts, which – handily enough – are a remedy for flatulence, so everything turned out happily in the end!

Some of you may remember this: it’s the x-ray I had done of my hip last summer. I would desperately love another one, but so far no-one has offered. If you look on the right hand side, where the ‘ball’ fits into the ‘socket’ you can see how much narrower the gap between them is than on the right. If you look even more carefully, you can see how my left-hand side (that’s on your right) is a lot less well developed than the right.

The reason I’m having all this bother now is because I had Congenital Hip Dysplasia (CDH) but it wasn’t discovered until I was about three months old. Apparently one of the causes can be a lack of amniotic fluid in pregnancy: that never made much sense until I saw the x-ray, but I’m guessing if there wasn’t much room for mini-me to swim about in, then maybe everything might end up a bit squished. Certainly my mum likes to boast that she had a nice, neat bump when she was carrying me, and I can well believe it, because she’s not the sort who would’ve sat about eating cake for two for nine months!

Not that my mum talks about it much. I know it was an incredibly difficult time for her – and no doubt my dad, too. One minute she had a baby with odd-length legs, the next she’s being told I have a serious condition and I spend most of the next two or three years in an orthopaedic hospital. I spent my first birthday there. And I wonder why our relationship is so weird and screwy sometimes…

Luckily, this was only a physiotherapy appointment, but even so, the physio was the only help I was getting, and I liked my physio lady, Shan – she was very sweet and good humoured about me telling her that i was only ever totally pain-free when vodka was involved.

But no, I am beyond the help of the physio. Apparently, the range of movement is so poor now that in some directions I now score a big fat MINUS. On the plus side, however, she had a word with the High Priest of Orthopaedic Physiotherapy and he is recommending that she asks my GP to refer me to Gobowen,which is the hospital which treated me as a child. How long the waiting list for an appointment there is, I don’t know. I know here it’s about 26 weeks, and I had another 22 to go. What I do know is that it’s deteriorating very quickly, and the physio agreed. I can stand for about ten minutes maximum, and that’s without actually weightbearing on my left side. I can walk about 1/4 of a mile before the pain becomes so excruciating that I yelp involuntarily. I wake constantly in the night.

I’m going to look into getting a better mattress. When we moved house in March, my folks bought me a new bed, which came with an allegedly ‘firm’ mattress. What is firm about the mattress are the springs which protrude painfully and horribly. I think my ‘new’ mattress, out of financial necessity, will have to be second-hand, so I’ll have to try very hard not to think about other people’s enuresis and death-bed scenarios and concentrate on me being more comfortable.

I woke up crying in the night. I realised that at this rate I will not be able to walk for much longer. It was my birthday three months ago – I went out in 4″ heels and danced like a fool. Now the thought of walking across the kitchen to put the kettle on is terrifying.

I am trying to be brave, but I don’t like this one bit.

You may laugh, but bizarrely enough I do actually have a job interview for the post of Ward Sister tomorrow. Those of you who are familiar with the Carry On  films will have an idea of how my brain is imagining my potential promotion: Lots of ‘Ooh, Matron!’ moments, plenty of scrapes involving hiding lost goats in the sluice and escapees running wild in the community with axes. Well, hopefully not the last one. Things like that look very bad in The Daily Mail.

So yes, job interview. I decided not to tick the ‘do you have a disability?’ box when I did the online application, because if I take enough pain killers and just grit my teeth, I’m fine. I’m fairly certain the drugs don’t affect my judgement, which renders me safe to be dishing them out to other people. There’s an old operating theatre stool in our clinical room which I sit on behind the hatch when I dispense the patient’s medication. It makes me a bit short, but it helps. I suspect at some point very soon I’m going to have to see the Occupational Health people and get some kind of risk assessment done on my ability to work et cetera. Boring but necessary, I suppose.

 Whichever: if you’re here because you’re backtracking and want to start at the beginning, then Hello – this is as far back as it goes. If you’re here because you’re here now, and you’re waiting for the exciting stuff, then hold tight – I’ll be writing as often as I have the time and the inclination. If you’re here because you’re a complete stranger and you happened on me and my hip and my blog by accident then Hello to you too; it’s always good to meet new people.

For the record, I’m at work as I write tonight. I work on an adult mental health ward in a smallish seaside town in Wales. I was in horrendous pain this morning but I made the executive decision to double-dose on my Diclofenac because that’s the only way I get any actual pain relief, and that only lasts about three hours. One tablet’s meant to last for eight. It’s a bit crap, to say the least. I was trying to explain to my son earlier how it feels, and the best I could come up with was, it’s like when someone gives you a dead arm, you know, when they punch you really hard right in that little dent just below the shoulder? Well it’s like that, two seconds after the school bully’s thumped you, only in my hip. If you look at my thigh (of which I’ll probably spare you the treat), you can see where it is because there’s a reddish ring that marks the spot, with a sprig of purple veins as a garnish. The whole thing has my original surgery scar running diagonally through it. And yeah, it hurts, lots.