I could hardly have predicted what this year would bring and as the nights slowly reduce to extended gloaming I'm already looking back at a lost year. After January's aborted ride home from Torridon I was largely laid up by strong winds, a lack of flexi time and a couple of rather bad colds that had me bed bound twice. But worse was to come.
At the end of January I hauled myself over to the hostel at Glen Nevis on the last Friday initially hoping to do a 200 on Morvern and Morar to get 3 in but I realized it wasn't happening and 1 RRTY was going to have to be dropped.
The cough wasn't gone, the lethargy wasn't gone and I wasn't exactly flying on the gentle terrain.
In fact I was straining away at a horribly low cadence, in bigger gears than I'd normally use and planted at 130bpm. I probably shouldn't have headed out at all but the lure of that 5xRRTY cloth badge...
By the time I got home late on the Saturday night something really was amiss and not with my lungs, my left ankle was aching for some reason. But RRTY 4 done, 5 a few months in, 6 dropped for now.
I hobbled around for a few days and the problem seemed to go, the storms again kept me off the bike although I still wasn't really feeling up to it as I recovered from the nasty lurgy that had floored me at the end of January, and then I started to feel a slight pain in the back of my calf.
I seemed to be struggling a bit while walking at lunch time one week and then the next I was walking really fast, like power walking, one of my colleagues commented on how out of breath I was when I got back to the office, my resting HR was also high, I put it down to lurgy recovery.
Then I had a couple of days of back pains, sharp pings in my lower right flank, urgh.
The niggling ache was still there when I booked the last Wednesday of February as flexi but I thought nothing of it and on the Tuesday night I fiddled with the bike and tested it to make sure the extended lay up hadn't affected it. Lying down in bed that night I noted my left inner thigh felt a bit odd, and then as I tried to get to sleep my right lower back pinged, and it pinged repeatedly through the night.
I was feeling rough when I got up in the morning and realized I wasn't riding, my back aching but nothing else was sore, I fired off a DNS e-mail to my local DIY organizer and went back to bed and managed to get a half decent sleep.
When I woke I my left knee wouldn't bend properly to climb out of bed, trying to get my feet on the floor I realized it was much worse than that, I couldn't properly put weight on the leg either.
I hobbled around carefully for a bit, and deciding it wasn't too bad I went back to bed to see how I was the next day. Not much better, ach RRTY 5 over, rest needed I can get that at work.
I struggled around work for the day and got ready for an "important" project management (ugh) training course the next day.
When I woke up on the Friday things had got a lot worse, now I couldn't put any weight on the leg or bend the knee. I mixed hanging onto things and hopping to get downstairs and nicked Mum's walking stick as an aid. Ice, compression, leg up, Count Duckula DVD in, it was going to be a considerably less interesting weekend than I'd planned, it was also nice, calm and sunny for once FFS!
On the plus side I got 2 doctors for the price of 1 (a 4th Year Med Student on Elective and my registered GP) when I went for my appointment on the Monday, by now I was able to move around with the aid of a knee support and they both had a check and came to the same conclusion.
Both Gastrocnemius swollen, probable calf strain, RICE it and come back if you can't get around at work. Might need physio.
Fed up of being at home even with Cosgove and Hall's genius on the telly I went to work the next day and was introduced to the Health Board's plans for the then UK SARS-COV-2/COVID19 response which was to let everyone get sick and ride it out. Which if it went as well as expected, 40% of staff available at its worst and I could be redeployed to anywhere... most likely portering as it's easier to train a software developer for that than nursing. (Humans apparently don't have a debugger or particularly advanced diagnostic tools, hence we only know who died with the disease not directly due to it). I pointed out a small problem with me being redeployed to anything that didn't involve sitting still all day with my leg elevated.
My next interest was finding a physio, they all now had warnings saying they wouldn't see anyone with even a sniffle; this is handy for anyone with rhinitis who always has a sniffle...
So with that option shut I went looking on the internet (this I have done before with my dodgy right ankle, not exactly a great indication of the likely success of the approach) to tide over and about the same amount of information I'd probably get from a self-referral to MSK since there's an extended waiting list.
Thankfully someone, possibly Emanuel Macron gave Alexander De Peffel a boot up the arse and the resulting change of plan means it's not been that bad, with my return to walking and cycling occurring slowly from the start of April, I've been rather enjoying the deserted roads as a diversion from the busyness of work if not the monotony of wandering round the building repeatedly at lunch times.
I realize that my entire plans for the year were wiped out by this injury, virus and disease but it's worked in my favour financially as lost transport ticket costs and entry fees have been either refunded or deferred to when things get back to normal again, and hopefully by then I'll be back to normal too.
Stay Safe Folks.
