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Dreadful Nonsense

"I've read your blog. it's really funny. you should write a column." - Jon Ronson

Today, two years ago, I was lying in hospital. I had just gone through my second epidural procedure in six months, and I could see this pattern stretching ahead of me forever more, once every six months going through the dread, the screaming agony of the injection, the weird feeling like you’ve been beaten up for days afterwards, the worrying that the injection won’t take and that the painkilling effect will be minimal, the nagging anxiety that my body will start to get used to the drugs, the thought that without the injections I can no longer walk for any meaningful amount of time, the misery and depression at having to face full on my worst nightmares of being housebound in my twenties and never fully recovering…

There were some of the things I was lying in the hospital thinking about, today two years ago. It was a date that I would have never forgotten anyway, since every day following on from that my life got better and better. The injection took. My physio continued. My recovery increased. My fitness levels improved. My life changed completely. I got a job, I moved to London, I got another job. On the one-year anniversary of my epidural injection, I walked from the city of London to North London, a distance of about five miles. Doesn’t sound like much, but a year before that I couldn’t have walked five yards.

It’s the one thing I can still get tearful thinking about, the one aspect of my life I will never forget about, the one thing I’m so incredibly grateful for. I’m back in physio now, having had a minor hiccup, but one minor hiccup in two years is so dramatically brilliant I would like to write an opera about it. There’s so much ick in the world, and there’s a certain amount of ick in my life (as there is in everyone’s life - mine at the moment is shaped like a mouse), but I do try to be eternally aware that, compared to so many, my life is freakishly brilliant.

This entry was posted on 07 July 2006 at 3:19 pm. 0 comments

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