Football

Ah, football. Guaranteed to take your mind off injuries, work and Room 101. This is where I was on Saturday...

Bright sunshine, blue sky, a winter's day and the finest example of the beautiful game: Union Street FC v North Oxford Reserves, in the RT Harris City League Division One. The location? The magnificent Sandy Lane, Oxford. The home of football. Kind of. Note: fully-engorged gas tower, low-key dressing rooms and U.S.F.C warming up.

More of that funky sunshine. Jumpers for goalposts, the thrill of the chase, balls in the air, long throw-ins... Kinda warms the heart, doesn't it?

Our bored goalkeeper Danny Kavanagh. See the gas tower a bit closer up. That's Tesco's car park just behind there, you know.

Danny K clears his lines. Nice action shot, eh? Rather pleased with that. My hands was bleedin freezin though. Should've taken my gloves if I wanted to take photos, shouldn't I?

Ol' Rich 'straight leg' Adams chases for the ball with some other folk. Just so you know, the mighty Union Street won 7 - 1, which is pretty much unheard of. When I started playing for them we were more likely to lose 10 - 0 than win anything. Shows how things change, eh? Hmmm?

The knee's hurting a bit, and the docs should really warn you that losing a bit of hamstring really HURTS afterwards. I'm really paranoid that I'm going to do something that ruins the new ligament. I'm walking around with straight legs (bit like Rich above) and hoping that it doesn't twist and break again. I'll find out if the op has worked for sure in a few weeks...

Work

Back to work, what joy! What a lark! Makes you feel ecstatic to be here, hmmm?

Oh well, at least it's good to be in the land of the semi-living again. I'd actually forgotten how to hold a conversation (and, let's be honest, I had only the most tenuous grasp of that in the first place).

Achievements of the day
1. I answered / deleted / left for next week approximately 200 e-mails. Well done me.
2. I had the same conversation with approximately 15 different people. Not bad.
3. I had a cup of tea.
4. I did my exercises in one of our meeting rooms. I did get some funny looks through the window whilst doing the pelvic thrusts.
5. I walked up and down the stairs twice. I also had a staircase stand-off: I was on the inside (need the rail, you see), and this woman refused to budge. How rude.

I also got sent this rather magnificent diagram of my knee from one of my colleagues. It's actually the same as the one they use in medical textbooks. Marvellous stuff.

Bravo

Today's the day I took my dressing and steri-strips off, 10 days after my ACL reconstruction op. Thought everyone would like to see what state my knee is in. Nice, huh?

These are the steri-strips. Pretty, don't you think? It was agony taking off the dressing. I don't think there's one hair left on my knee. Ouch, ouch, ouch. You can put ripping massive plasters off in my room 101, any day.

And here's the knee in all it's glory. First daylight it's seen for 10 days. Nice to feel a draft on it, too.

I've got to say, doctors are flippin' clever, aren't they? They 'harvested' a hamstring, somehow screwed it in to the middle of my knee, and only left two marks - a neat little hole, and a tidy strip. Imagine the mess if we tried to do that. Scabs and blood everywhere. Bravo modern science, that's what I say.

Knees

It's a picture of my knees. Woo hoo. The yellow-stain under my left knee is cos I haven't washed my leg properly since last Wednesday, and they cover you with that weird iodine stuff when they operate. The two dressings on my knee cover the very precise keyhole, err, holes they made during the op, and the one on my thigh is where they put a dirty great tube to drain off the blood. I have to keep the dressings dry until they come off in 10 days, hence the no-washings.

It's not that swollen, but I'm still under strict instructions to keep it rested and iced. To be honest, if I do so much as walk up the stairs it aches loads, so it's for the best. I'm just glad it doesn't hurt like when I injured it in the first place - that was eye-watering, can't-move-at-all pain that I'd rather not experience again. I just need to put all this rest to good use: blog waffle, laptop idiocy, and beard growth.

Injuries

I'm injury prone. It's a harsh truth, but one I've come to cope with over time. I asked my physio once why it might be so, and she said it's because I have joints which 'hyper-extend' or some-such. I think she was being kind. Mind you, I do have flat feet, and I don't think that helps at all, what with the pressures on the ankles, knees, groin, back and all sorts. Anyway, for those who want to feel smug in their injury-free lives, here's a quick run-down of all the injuries in my life so far:

broken wrist (aged 12, trying to save a penalty)
broken collar bone (aged 13, falling over in the box a la Cobham)
broken wrist, again (aged 13, can't remember how)
broken big toe (aged 15, 'moshing' in my mate's bedroom)
numerous heavily sprained ankles (aged 19-25, all playing football)
cracked rib (aged 25, when we lost 10-0 to East Oxford, and one of them kung-fu kicked me)
groin strain (aged 26, when we beat North Oxford and I got booked for calling the ref 'surreal')
sprained medial ligaments, right knee (aged 27, trying to foul someone v Testworth)
ruptured anterior cruciate ligament, left knee (aged 28, err, jumping in the air and landing)

Oh dear, I'll stop there. I think I'm getting a bit Martin Scarfe.

Operations

Oh, I'm sorry, I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. I've not even told you why I'm writing this yet. I've just had an operation on my knee, which I injured playing for the mighty Union Street FC back in March 2006. If you're interested in these things, I ruptured the ACL in my left knee winning a header against some chopsy-larrakin called Ramsey, and it took me all of 8 months to get an operation on the NHS.

The operation is really clever (or just plain horrific, depending on how squeamish you feel about these things). Your ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) is a ligament right in the middle of your knee that connects your tibia to your femur (look at me getting all technical) and stops your leg from shooting off in front of you. I ruptured that, which means that it isn't there any more (in the past 6 months I've learned the oh-so-important difference between a rupture and a tear).

You can play sport without an ACL - apparently my all-time Swindon Town hero, former Scotland midfielder and current Notts Forest manager Colin Calderwood kept playing after he ruptured it. It's just a question of building up the muscles around your knee (I imagine Colin had lovely thighs). But my consultant told me that if I want to play football - which is just about the nastiest thing you can do to your knees (just ask Martin Scarfe) - then an operation was the only way to go. Maybe he didn't like my thighs.

The ACL can't repair itself, so they (they being the clever doctors) need to graft (tear off) a bit of ligament from somewhere else. Sounds fun, huh? They could take a bit from the ligament that attaches your patella (knee cap) to your leg. Mmmm, nice. Or they could take a bit of your hamstring (there's plenty to spare apparently) - which was what they did with me.

So, the operation goes a little something like this: drug the patient til his eyes pop and make some quite neat little holes in the front of his leg. Somehow take a strip of his hamstring (apparently they test its strength mid-op on a ligament-strength-testing machine - images of giggling surgeons pinging ligaments around the operating theatre abound) and screw it into place using dissolvable screws (hopefully they're not made of sugar, or I'm farked). Stitch patient up, stick a worryingly-large tube in his thigh to drain the blood from the knee, and laugh when patient wakes up from his anaesthetic - babbling like a drunkard to everyone in the ward.

Ta-da!