A PETERSFIELD woman left with pain like ‘walking on swords’ says the Covid pandemic has left her uncertain when her promised hip replacement operation will go ahead.

Brenda Pugh, 61, of Winchester Road (pictured) was put on the waiting list for a hip replacement in June 2020.

Experts say orthopedic surgery has been left the hardest hit by the Covid pandemic, during which hospitals across the country had to scale back on operations in treat coronavirus patients.

Brenda said: “I don’t know when the operation will be – if it’ll be six months or six years.

“It’s hard to mentally deal with that.

“If I didn’t think positively I wouldn’t be able to carry on.

“It would be lovely to be communicated with a bit more often – even if it’s just to say we don’t know, and we are sorry. But there’s nothing.”

Brenda, who developed arthritis in 2019, says her life is now riddled with pain that’s like “walking on sharp swords”.

It prevents her from leaving her home, where she lives alone.

Before the arthritis made movement painful, she commuted to a busy job in London, loved walking her dog and enjoyed yoga.

She added: “I never thought I’d end up in this situation.”

A leading arthritis charity claims some 92,000 people have been waiting longer than 52 weeks for hip replacement operation.

This is compared to 700 people a year ago.

The huge backlog has been caused by the Covid pandemic.

Versus Arthritis says: “Hip and knee replacements were in the category of planned surgery that has been worst affected and slowest to restart over the past year”.

The charity says there is “no end date in sight” for thousands of people in agony, many of whom have stopped working, have become depressed, and are housebound.

An NHS spokesperson said: “Treating more than 350,000 patients for Covid-19 throughout the pandemic has inevitably had a knock-on effect on other care.

“But even in January this year – the NHS’s busiest month for Covid-19 admissions, with more than 100,000 patients – hard-working staff treated more than one million people for other conditions.”