After an operation, I’m in uncharacteristic floods of tears over ‘Love Actually’

What sort of joyless person could possibly sneer at romcoms? Well, me – until 10 days ago, writes Jenny Eclair

Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon in the 2003 romcom (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

I had an operation about 10 days ago, a full-on, general anaesthetic, buttock-revealing gown and sexy surgical support tights number. I haven’t had many medical procedures in my life, just a bog-standard appendectomy when I was 15 and wagging school with a vague “tummy ache”, which the doctor took far more seriously than I did.

This was followed by a more alarming, “just before Christmas” tonsillectomy when I was 18. An op which resulted in a 3am dash back to the hospital just days after being discharged, due to a small haemorrhage. My mother drove her little orange Mini through amber lights, swearing all the way to Blackpool Vic, while I bled into one of the “good towels” from the airing cupboard.

I was put in the children’s ward and, due to coughing up clots of blood, had forgotten to pack my make-up bag. Consequently, when my rather more grown-up boyfriend came to visit me, he walked straight past my bed.

I remember the ward being visited by a choir and gifts being handed out by Santa. I got a comb in a plastic case. I don’t recall what the girl in the next bed got, but I will never forget that she’d been in a car accident and lost her mother.

Apart from those two incidents and a straightforward delivery of a baby girl over 30 years ago in Kings College Hospital, I have managed to avoid ward life, until, at the age of 61, I did something excruciating to my neck that rendered my left hand semi-useless.

As I mentioned before Christmas, I booked the op privately, feeling fortunate to afford it before the hand stopped working altogether. Even now, it’s going to take months of rehab to get its full strength and mobility back, but I am no longer in lip-biting pain.

Obviously, I remember nothing about the op itself; that’s the point of anaesthetic. However, I do remember saying “this isn’t working” to my kindly anaesthetist, my natural paranoia convincing me that I was going to be one of those “locked in’’ patients who felt every scrape of the knife, while being powerless to do anything about it. I wasn’t, I was dreamlessly unconscious throughout.

Coming round, on the other hand, affected me in ways I hadn’t really thought about and for the 24 hours following the op, I was ludicrously emotional. I cried with relief to be alive, I cried when someone questioned me for mentioning my saintly “male nurse” on Twitter, because obviously I wouldn’t have said “female nurse”. Ah Twitter, bless you, you never fail to be anything less than fantastically unforgiving in any circumstance. I cried over my egg mayonnaise sandwich because, well, imagine dying and never having egg mayonnaise again?

In between the crying, pressing the magic fentanyl pain relief button whenever I needed, and occasionally altering the position of my bed like I was flying business class to somewhere exotic, I was also on oxygen for a while.

Never has my mind felt clearer and by the evening, when I should have been nodding off, I felt like my brain had spent the day on the top of a Swiss mountain. My body may have been a bit mangled, but the clarity of my thoughts meant I grabbed my phone, wrote 10 minutes of new stand-up and sorted out some structural problems I’d been having with a Radio 4 monologue.

When I woke up the next day, the oxygen was no longer needed and I had another little cry. To be honest, I’m not sure what they did to me in that operating theatre because the emotional side effects are still with me. I have a horrible feeling that apart from shaving down a bulging disc in my neck that was pressing down on a nerve, they may have shaved off some of my bulging cynicism.

Case in point, I watched Love Actually for the first time in my life and sobbed my way through the entire movie. I genuinely thought it was brilliant. OK, there’s a bit of fat-shaming nonsense that hasn’t aged well and some characters aren’t as well written as others, but come on, what sort of joyless person could possibly sneer? Well, me – until 10 days ago.

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Worse was to come, as the festive episode of Call the Midwife made me cry so much that I had to change my pyjama top because it was soaked through with tears. Seriously, I barely recognise myself. Who is this overly sentimental fool who now wants to watch Notting Hill, despite having religiously avoided it for 22 years?

I’ve been told that it will take six weeks before I am physically capable of holding a full kettle. By then, I should be properly healed and back to being my normal, cynical old bag self.

In the meantime, bring on Frozen, let me rewatch Little Women. There’s a massive number of emotionally manipulative romcoms out there that I am now in a sufficiently weakened state to properly enjoy.