it s nothing Serious
Andrew Marr s body is paying the price for a lifetime of long distance running one of his Achilles tendons has ruptured and the other is not looking so hot. So, how is he coping?
There should be a name for that middle category of ailment which is neither Serious nor entirely quite Trivial; all the sore, embarrassing or merely inconvenient failures of flesh and sinew, which are not life threatening but you know.
There s a whole butcher s window of torn muscles, malfunctioning organs, crocked joints and viral oddities about which the British sufferer is expected to be hearty and dismissive.
So it s just a touch of back trouble or nothing much, slight problem with the waterworks or they re just whipping it out and sticking in some plastic gubbins, amazing reapatagonia drifter shoes for salelly. And in this everyman s land between the Reaper and Aspirin, nothing provokes a stifled guffaw like sports injury .
Fair enough, really: the skier s plaster cast, tennis elbow and the rugby player s cauliflower ear have been cartoonists staples for a century.
There are enough cancers, strokes and heart attacks around for us to keep our sympathy focused there, and not on middle aged people who insist on doing a little more than their body feels is reasonable. I m not touting for sympathy. Medically, in the great run of things I m a lucky sod.
And the great run of things is where the trouble started. At school, lacking eye hand coordination or courage, I took to long distance running.
Everything about it appealed to me. Though never cpatagonia down sweater full-zip hoody reviewompetitive, and excluding a few years of hard drinking and smoking, I ve been doing it ever since. Everywhere I went, round parks, along riverbanks, and while away at work or on holiday, from Washington to Corsica, the Scottish Highlands to Moscow, I d put on my shoes and lope off.
Usually I d have some music on. I could run for 10 or 12 miles easily, up hills, in all temperatures, on any surface except ice and snow.
Once I did a marathon, more or less on thepatagonia down sweater full-zip hoody review2 spur of the moment, though it was in Amsterdam and you don t get flatter than that. Running was partly who I was. It was meant to keep me sane though friends and family would occasionalpatagonia apastron hooded insulated jacket reviewly point out that it hadn t worked.
A year ago, I was getting sore Achilles tendons. I d had the trouble before but changed my running shoes and the pain had gone.
This time, it didn t. I sweated and hobbled for a couple of weeks before giving up and looking for help. For the past year, I ve had massages, acupuncture, physiotherapy, a nasty process called autologous blood injections and a plastic boot. None of it helped. I was in constant pain, just walking around.
Last Friday the Thirteenth I went to see a surgeon, a top man with ankles called Mark Davies. We joked about the date and he said he thought he knew the trouble.
I needed another scan and an anaesthetic injection. At least I hadn t ruptured the (worse) right tendon. That was something to hold onto.
That evening, in the middle of cooking supper, there was a great bang and I thought I d fallen through a floorboard. But there was no broken floorboard. On the ground myself, I could tell by looking at the leg what had happened. There was a gap. My calf had ambled north.
Uswomen's patagonia rover shoes size 6 brand newually, you can pull the two patagonia rising movie reviewends ofpatagonia 50% off online sale a ruptured tendon together and suture them together again, a keyhole operation. My tendon was so wrecked this would not work.
I asked Mark to describe it as vividly as he could, no matter how disgusting. He thought for a moment. A combination of shredded blotting paper and rotten crab meat. Oh, I said, that is disgusting. Blotting paper and crab meat? No, rotten crab meat. So he took out another tendon, the one runningpatagonia better sweater 2013 from the back of the leg to the big toe, and used that to try to repair the Achilles, like one piece of rope cannibalised to restore another.
He sewed me up, a four inch wound, neatly done. I spent a fortnight on my back in a plaster, and am now still mostly horizontal with a thick Velcro and steel boot that makes me look like a cyberman from thpatagonia discount code icrackede knee down.
It would probably have been bloody sore, butpatagonia discount code mcafee I kept taking mouthfuls of tablets. I also learned to inject myself, to keep deep vein thrombosis at bay, something I d squeamishly thought would be hard to do, but isn t.
Now, just beginning physio, with a floppy foot and a wasted leg, it is likely to be Christmas before I can stand unaided, and the New Year before I can begin to walk, though you never know.
Trying to shower, with something that looks like a sperm whale s condom on the end of my leg, is tricky. I have crutches but because my left Achilles is also bad, can t go far with them.
Ipatagonia down sweater full-zip hoody review1n the house I propel myself around on a knee trolley (great invention, made in Dorset). Stairs are hard. Buttocks, mainly. To get into the TV studio for my programme, Sunday AM, the BBC lay on a wheelchair.
In fact, the BBC, let it be said, has been wonderful. I haven t been under pressure to go back too early, and we ve had to completely muck about with filming schedules for a history of modern Britain since it means striding about, which seems a long way off just now.
Mostly, I just feel a complete fool. A mere sports injury , see? Nothing really bad, and yet completely disabling.
Of course, in the long dark nights, it feels like another of these middle aged moments when something one has relied on unthinkingly caves in, and the opportunities ahead seem to narrow just a little.
When I ask the surgeon and physiotherapist about whether I ll be able to run again one day, they are worryingly vague. Tendons don t heal as easily as bones or muscles, particularly if they are in the state mine are.
The medicine is less advanced than for other joints. Visitors, Mr Marr? sa插入patagonia down sweater full-zip hoody review30ys the nurse. Well, there s your producer Mr Barney Jones of the BBC, various members of your family and a rather cadaverous gentleman who won t give his name but says he s come with Time s Winged Chariot.
But that s only in the small hours. At 47 I have been lucky and this is only irritating. Nobody is to blame, not even me. If I had my time again, I d still have done all that running, through other bright and spangled autumns, Springsteen or Mozart on the iPod; I don t regret a minute or a mile.
If I cannopatagonia down sweater full-zip hoody review0t run again then there is no choice; a bath chair, a thick tartan rug and a large malt whisky. What mate? Me, mate? Naah, nothing much, just a sports injury.
