Country life
Back and the future
Leanda de Lisle
Bad backs are as common in Leicester- shire as bad consciences in Westminster. Every town and village has an army of quacks to manipulate the spines and relax the muscle spasms of the hunting fraterni- ty. Sitting on a horse may give you bandy legs, but if you fall from one you are likely to come away with a bandy back as well. For some, the consequences are even more serious. The last chairman of the Quorn broke his back riding in the Bullingdon point-to-point when he was an undergradu- ate. He has been paralysed ever since. My father-in-law, who is the current chairman, broke his back in a fall two or three years ago. He was lucky, coming within an eighth of an inch of snapping his spinal cord. So he can still walk, although he's been told he has to give up hunting if he wants to keep it that way.
I remember being told as a child that you had to fall off your pony at least 100 times before you could call yourself a rider. So I regarded my own tumbles with equanimity, even pride. However, I now believe one of those falls may explain why I found it impossible to 'stand up straight', as the grown-ups constantly exhorted me to. At 15, I slipped a disc getting out of my moth- er's car. She immediately arranged for me to see a specialist. Like half a dozen others I have seen since, he told me to strip down to my underclothes, made me do a series of rather undignified leg lifts, sent me for an X—ray and concluded that I had a mild cur- vature of the spine and that it was just too damn bad.
When I took up hunting after I married, I wore an elastic corset under my jacket so I could cope with the strain that a strong horse puts on your back muscles. Unfortu- nately it didn't help much when I fell. My husband would bellow at me to remount, as everyone conscious must, but while my spirit was willing my back was usually dislo- cated. The human vultures who hang around the big fences would carry me off the field in ignominy and I would have to hobble around like a 90-year-old for the next fortnight.
Things got worse after I had my second child. Perhaps it was the pregnancy. Per- haps it was being hit by a bus when I was daydreaming on a pavement in Paris. Whatever it was, not only does my disc now slip with frightening regularity, my legs have started to buckle under me. I will be walking down the street and suddenly I will let out a shriek of pain. For some reason this causes every man in a ten-yard radius to jump in terror. The most worrying thing, though, is that my strong-willed mother-in- law is becoming increasingly determined that I should wear a corset at all times.
Frantic, I told my GP that I wanted an operation, something, anything, done right now. So he sent me to a rheumatologist and last week I found myself standing in my knickers in front of a strange man yet again. He put his thumbs on my hips and said, 'Well, you haven't got rheumatism, but you are hideously disfigured.' Then he stood back and contorted himself quite monstrously and added, 'You're like this.' I wanted to kiss him. At last, someone who takes my back problems seriously. Better still, he claims he may be able to rebuild me. 'You must have a scan,' he told me. `Do you suffer from claustrophobia? Well, we'll soon find out.'
Having a back scan is like being buried alive. You lie on a bed which moves into a coffin-sized scanning machine and there you stay for half an hour. To make matters worse my machine was situated, not in the hospital, but in a van. So I tried not to think about Poland or the war while I lay trapped, listening to the strange knocking noises the scanner makes while it's taking its pictures. My beloved rheumatologist is going to give me the results later today. I still think that it's too much to hope that anyone can straighten me out after 25 years. But, whatever happens, I think that, like my father-in-law, it's unlikely I will ever risk riding a horse again.
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