Friday 21st January 2022.
On reflection that’s when there was something wrong, for the first time.
I was 2 thirds of the way up the side of the volcano in Tenerife with the boy wonder, Louis, I couldn’t go any further.
We stopped at a left hander, kind of like a half hair pin and I sat on a rock.
It was the second time up the volcano that week and that is a tough ride, but I had pain in my lung on the left side at the back and big breaths in were really painful.
It wasn’t a pain that worried me (not like a heart attack pain), but it wasn’t the pain of somebody who was a fit and healthy 50-year-old cyclist who climbed up the side of volcanos for fun.
I put it down to old age and perhaps the stress of building a practice and the loss of fitness from 2018 as a result of all the stuff that was going on in my life during that period.
I resolved to do something about it.
On the Tuesday after that I tested positive for covid on my return test from Tenerife and stayed in my room for 5 days, but I had almost no symptoms.
I did yoga and press-ups and rode the bike in the shed out the back when no one was in the house.
I had not had though, the sabbatical experience that I’d had three times before.
I was tired and a little bit sad and resolved to change the format of the sabbatical from here on in because it just didn’t work anymore.
I’ve done that with a few things which just didn’t work anymore.
I began to think that reaching my 50th birthday was going to be a physiological watershed, not just a psychological one.
But then I returned to work and all seemed ok.
I’d been falling asleep really easily at nights, sometimes in the middle of conversations with Alison (much to her annoyance) but that was just old age wasn’t it?
I was putting weight on because it was winter, and I always put weight on in the winter but despite the fact I’d dissolved several times to get that weight back off again it wasn’t coming off.
I was struggling to button up my jeans.
The elastic on my boxers was turning over (that’s quite a bad sign).
And then I saw a patient from my hometown in Scotland and I was explaining to her that I was reading a book about the lead singer and founder of the band Primal Scream which I’d been trying to read the night before.
I told her I would buy her a copy, but I couldn’t remember his name.
I realised there were a lot of things I couldn’t remember.
That’s when I started to become concerned.
I am pretty much sh*t at everything but I’m not sh*t at remembering.
I repeatedly and on an almost daily basis annoy people with my memory of quotes from books and films and people’s names and faces and the treatment I carried out for patients 20 years ago on exactly which day.
I don’t forget.
I decided I had to write down the forgetfulness and began to be concerned that, that might be something, the nature of which I did not want to find out.
And then the pain, particularly in my legs in the muscles.
It was coming daily and walking up the stairs at work became difficult.
And then, in a meeting with the genius that is Hayley Brown, in my office I asked her to go and get the pulse oximeter from downstairs.
I remember her looking at me in disbelief, but I said I was breathless and needed to check it.
The breathlessness was making me check how significant the breathlessness was while I was at work.
The problem with insipid things is that they are insipid and so as I write it here it all seems glaringly obvious, but I was trying to pass it off as this or that or the other until I fell off the cliff.
As I dictated this blog, I realised that it’s much longer than expected, come back tomorrow for part 2!
Blog Post Number - 3054
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