Hi, Dave!!

Some aspects of this getting older and supposedly wiser thing are a bit rough, aren't they? I quite like my grey hair but I was less than impressed with the cataract I had removed, last year and the arthritis can just do one.

Naproxen's your best friend. Physio is when some bloke phones you up a year after your referral to tell you how to download some shit exercises from the web that you knew about anyway but rejected because you can't get across the room let alone "stretch regularly".

I have to save the Naproxen for when I put something out of joint because, even with omeprazole, it wrecks my guts. I have enough other stuff to make me rattle, though.

And yeah, the physio was mostly useless. The back exercises were great but the ones for my knees just made them hurt more. I saw an occupational therapist who recommended me a load of the grey vinyl stuff that you see on rightmove in probate sales and made me a hand splint that wasn't as good as the support I bought for £8 on t'Interweb.

That was all before the NHS completely imploded.

At the risk of turning this thread into an "old-folks-compare-illness" session:
Yep, exactly. January 23 2019 I drove home from a weekend away in Bournemouth and noticed that both my knees were getting a bit uncomfortable. By the next day I couldn't walk across the room without crutches and the pain was excrutiating. Stayed that way until the middle of June when my friendly local physio phoned out of the blue under the impression that I had bad arms. Emailed me a link to some exercises. Me and Mrs WilliamA had a good laugh at the leg stretches. I couldn't even get my legs into the starting position without tears and sweat pouring off me, let alone stretch. 

I'm really lucky though. Within about a month of that, and without a single exercise, my knees relented and I was up and walking almost like normal. X-rays suggested I hadn't done too much damage either. Touch wood (nj) I haven't had anything as bad as that since. Still ache if I overdo it and my GP cheers me up with the news that my hips will need "doing" in a few years (the odd part is that three of my old school chums who were always super fit and healthy have had hips and knees replaced already).

 

I suppose being super fit can involve putting your joints under some strain and wear. And you gotta work on flexibility and whatnot separately to most of the fitness stuff.

I'm 45 now and veteran of rather more physio (NHS and private) than I'd like to be thanks to various shoulder surgeries and mountain bike crashes etc. Enough that I can even ill-informedly speculate on why your knees got better! Had you done a lot of walking around that weekend as well? Apparently if the cartilage is thin and abused enough you can literally bruise the bones. And/or if you have bony ridges forming they can inflame the tendons and stuff, that's sore as hell too.

It's reasonably likely I have some arthritic times to look forward to sooner or later, apart from the shoulders I definitely have at least one foot heading that way (which is where I got that cartilage/bone bruising info from). Touch wood, my knees and hips seem ok so far, despite me being in A&E for a day last year when they thought I might have fractured my pelvis. That was another mtb crash, couldn't walk for a fortnight without crutches but nothing broken, woohoo! (the catalogue that day - no ability to put weight on one leg for the fortnight, plus a concussion and 40 minutes missing memory, don't think I was actually unconscious though, sore shoulder couldn't sleep on that side for a couple of weeks, and the thing that lasted longest was that I wrenched one of my thumbs and the ligaments were sore for weeks and weeks after.)


 

Crikey! How much are your insurance premiums?

Insurance? Ha. There is a policy through my job actually but generally the excess makes it pretty pointless for me so far.

I do get an insurance policy when I’m off doing something like an Alp, but (touch wood) never had more than a minor graze when I’m out there. It’s the mild local trails seem to catch me out.

I seem to recall (all glue/face related jokes aside) that your shoulder is as well fixed in place as a Pinocchio puppet's and a decent sneeze can dislocate it. Isn't that a bit of a disincentive to biking?

I suppose I can answer that myself because I love walking more than my knees and hips do. Actually, as long as I don't go mad and walk too fast or too far everything stays pretty cool. 
 

The pandemic probably helped to kill my love of walking because that's all there was to do. I managed to explore many nooks and crannies within Durham city with nanowibbly, mind, including places we can't normally get to on foot because of the traffic and I turned many a pokemon go gym gold, in the process. (no such walks with littlewibbly as he was pretty reclusive at the time)

And he's not so little any more. Taller and much wider than wibbleboy, in fact.

Lockdown was a strange old time. I still remember my first permitted exercise. aka my normal morning walk along the coast. It started exactly the same because there aren't often many people about here at 6:45 in the morning, but coming home was weird. Heading for 9:00 and no people, no traffic. Just like a scene from 28 Days later. Apart from the lack of Zombies who were presumably still at home wondering what to do with all their pasta and bog-roll.

I still love walking, even though it can quite literally be a pain in the backside. But I'm lucky to have a coastal walk plus woodlands that start on the edge of town and extend for miles. the pressure is starting to build all over it at the moment (all inexpensive social-housing you understand - yeah, right) which is worrying. Especially when you see the acres of brownfield and ex-commercial sites just sitting around empty. It's almost as though the developers prefer to build ultra-expensive housing on leafy sites with sea-views for all the cash-rich second-home/landlord/investment buyers we seem to suffer with.

My shoulder is no longer as stable as a banana republic/UK government!

I can't remember where the story would be up to, here.

> I had a very dislocatable left shoulder for a few years. I did once manage to do it with a sneeze indeed. Keyhole surgery when I was 20 mostly fixed that.

> I bust my left shoulder's collarbone a couple of times. Once crashing a mountain bike, once getting knocked off a commuter bike by another cyclist being a stupid idiot who doesn't look before emerging across a road from behind a parked lorry and who was fortunate I wasn't a car. No surgery required but it's a little wonky since that second time.

> Just before my kid was born (so, ulp, just over 10 years ago) I dislocated the right one, crashing a mountain bike. This got progressively worse over time to the point where it was coming out quite often and very inconveniently (well, it never is convenient really but there are worse times like while swimming in deep water etc). It was becoming a barrier to the mountain biking because quite innocent little manouevres would sometimes pop it out and that tends to end the day/weekend prematurely.

> Keyhole surgery wasn't gonna fix it apparently, too far gone, so I got something called a Latarjet procedure done. This is where they take a bit of bone from the front of the shoulder/chest area and bolt it to the front of the shoulder socket to stop it being able to come out. There's some relocating of how various muscles connect around all of this as well. I think they're still attached to that bit of bone or something like that. Have to say, hats off to the NHS on doing that one and for giving me some nice morphine tablets for the next couple of days.

> I got some NHS physio to get over it, kinda felt it was a bit insufficient so also did some private on the side. My surgeon got pretty mad when he found out, saying I was going too far too fast. Oh well. I think we were pretty careful but I suppose I'll have to wait and see.

> Once I was done with physio I started working on extra rehab with a personal trainer to build up strength and hopefully avoid doing it again.

> I still see the trainer because I found I quite liked having a strong body (I'm not exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger but I have a lot more muscle and definition than ever before), find the added strength useful and the work we do on things like core and mobility mean I don't easily get back trouble etc and so on. My sessions range from traditional squatting heavy weights and so on to things that are pretty much just yoga/pilates really.

> I just really like mountain biking! Can't really stop until I'm incapable! And now they've invented e-bikes so when I'm not fit enough to pedal I should be able to get one of those.


Pedalling through London as lockdown started to ease was pretty fun in a a 28 Days Later style way.

It was indeed a strange time. I was so glad we had our dog because it forced both the wife and I to go out every day for a nice walk. Being otherwise confined to your house, I think it did us a world of good. Of course, being restricted to out local area (5 miles max during 1st lockdown) wasn't great and did make some of the walks a bit more repetitive, but it was interesting exploring some places we hadn't been to before, such as the private top-end of our local golf course.

We did have the advantage that when the second/third lockdowns happened, the rules up here became "don't go outside of your local authority area". A bit of a shit if you live in Aberdeen City like some of my wife's colleagues, but we're outside that in Aberdeenshire - you can drive almost 100 miles deep into the Cairngorms and still be in Aberdeenshire, so didn't feel restrictive at all to us.

Of course, saying all that the pandemic isn't an experience I'm eager to repeat again. I was thankful however that I already worked from home prior to lockdown, hence no adjustment was needed from that perspective and I already had a good home office set up - not like some of my colleagues sitting awkwardly at the kitchen table with their laptops!

 

Oh, most definitely. I had the joyous experience not long ago of suffering my first hemorrhoid - which was just terrific. What made it even better is that I was visiting my wife's parents in Germany at the time. Her dad is a retired medical doctor and insisted on checking it out (I wasn't sure what the hell it was at the time), and it's a simply marvelous experience to bare your arsehole at your father-in-law...  :-@

It would really have sucked if City of Durham was still a unitary authority but County Durham is huge. We could even have visited Barnard Castle, legitimately.

:D

Ok, so, I propose an annual Teh Day when we all pile back in here. When's good for y'all?

Any day you fancy. 1st of June?

Well, gosh, this place is still here. (heart)

I pop in once every couple of years, I guess, when I randomly think of it.

I was curious to see what date I first registered here, but apparently that's not in my profile. Member #39 though, so that feels pretty early.

It's reassuringly nostalgic to see quite so many names I remember still posting, even if it is for the first time in years.

When was the last Meat?

There was a London meet, that was quite well attended but it's going a good way back now - 10+ years, maybe even longer.

There's probably a thread!