……pain, or so the gym junkies say. Having never been one, I can’t really say, but they tell me it is so. Fitness hurts and you can’t get there without the attendant pain.
Well, I’m not fit, though I am working on it, but I have to be a little more clever about how I achieve it. Diet alone is not the answer so looking out for what you eat won’t get the desired result without making the body play its part. As I have detailed before, my injuries and the subsequent repairs that have been done to them means that I can’t run or jog any more. It also means that I can’t even walk quickly enough to get the cardiac benefit that brisk walking brings. And, even if I could, the degree of discomfort and pain associated with banging my right leg down on the concrete means that it just isn’t feasible.
Thankfully, as I have mentioned before, I have found a way that I can get the benefit without the added pain and discomfort. It also means that I don’t have to go to the pool all the time, though I know that I could achieve similar results with a regime of swimming. Yes, I have become a MAMIL (Middle Aged Man in Lycra). Well, that isn’t really true as I don’t do the Lycra thing, I look bad enough in shorts and a t shirt without doing that. But riding the pushbike has the benefits of exercising the muscles, building up strength and exercising the cardiac area as well.
But the pain? Well, that is a different issue altogether. Having a dirty big bar of titanium inside your femur and a plate screwed to the outside of the femur and a plate in your arm as well brings with it a whole world of pain on a constant basis. Sometimes it is bearable and sometimes it is pretty horrible, but, the one thing that I can be sure of is, that it is always there. You learn to sublimate it to a degree and to find work-arounds that limit the factors that trigger the pain but, basically, you do what you have to do and you pop pills when you have to.
So, when I was visiting my GP just before the Supers on another matter altogether, he asked me how I was going, as doctors do. I told him, then he said, “What about the pain. How are you managing there?” I told him that I take between 4 and 6 anti-inflammatory pills every day and, in extreme cases, more. He screwed up his brow as if that was news that he didn’t want to hear. Now I already know that long-term usage of any analgesic can be harmful and can have side-effects that are not desirable but, as I said to him, “What do you do, you have to get relief somehow?”
“Well, we might try something a bit different,” he said, “There are some slow-release pain killers now that work really well, don’t have quite the same side-effects and mean that you don’t have to be popping pills all day. I propose that we try that for a couple of months and see what happens, are you willing to give it a go?”
That was Monday afternoon. I filled the script at the chemist shop next door and took the first tablet (Naproxen 1000mg) on Tuesday morning. That was a couple of weeks ago and, apart from one day when I forgot to take the tablet, I haven’t taken a pain killing tablet since! It is quite astonishing. The pain is still there but to nothing like the intensity that it was and taking the new medication not only keeps it under control but also allows me to do more each day. A win-win situation.
I am aware that medications affect different people in different ways, but, as the saying goes, it works for me.