November to December 2023
This piece gathers the late-2023 health posts about arthritis, work, fear, fasting and another attempt to rebuild from what the body was saying rather than what the mind wanted to believe.
Winter arrives
Winter arrived with a stick in my hand.
As I sat down to write at the beginning of November, I was off work with arthritis. The pain in my hip had become too much to ignore, and a couple of weeks earlier, my doctor had told me to take time away from work and let my body rest.
I was back on medication. Anti-inflammatories.
Tablets to protect my stomach from the anti-inflammatory side effects.
Then, stronger painkillers were used when the first lot upset my stomach and did not do enough.
Rest helped.
But only up to a point.
As soon as I moved too far, the pain came back, and I had to stop. I started walking with a stick, which helped more than I expected, although it took some getting used to.
The hardest part was not only the pain.
It was the doubt.
At that point, I could not see how I was supposed to spend upwards of thirteen hours a day driving an HGV. Some days, I had enough trouble getting in and out of the car.
Truck driving had become part of the plan.
A practical job.
A wage.
A route through.
Then my hip stepped in and asked a different question.
What happens if your body will not let you keep doing the thing you have finally learned to do?
The diagnosis
The trouble had started much earlier in the year.
At first, it was my right knee.
There was a click. A grinding sensation. Not painful, exactly. Just odd. Around the same time, I began noticing a dull ache deep in my left thigh. In the evenings, I would sit there rubbing the outside of my leg without really thinking about it.
Rhona told me to see the doctor.
So I did.
The doctor sent me to the physiotherapy team in Dover. The physiotherapist moved my leg around, ran through a few tests, and then said it plainly.
Advanced osteoarthritis of the left hip joint.
That took me by surprise.
An X-ray later confirmed it.
At the follow-up appointment, the therapist showed me the images and explained that, at some point, I would probably need a hip replacement.
I told him I was not in much pain.
He explained that arthritis is progressive.
So I started doing the exercises I was given and carried on with life.
For a while, that worked.
There were sore days, but paracetamol usually took the edge off. I got through the summer and into October before the discomfort began to increase.
Then work changed.
I switched from truck driving to van-based crop protection deliveries for a few weeks. In and out of the van. In and out of chemical stores. Heavy lifting. Farm tracks. Awkward movements.
By the end of those three weeks, I was in agony.
The pain had probably been building anyway, but that work finished the job.
Off the road
In the middle of October, I called the doctor again and explained what was happening.
I was sent to the practice physiotherapist.
He explained that the ball at the head of my femur had started to change shape. That slight movement inside the socket was causing inflammation in the surrounding tissue. The muscles around the hip, buttock and lower back had started to compensate.
That explained a lot.
The pain was not in one neat place. It moved around. Hip. Thigh. Buttock. Back. Sometimes knee. Sometimes all of it at once.
I was told to stop working and rest.
Nearly seven weeks later, the pain was still there.
The walking stick helped. The medication helped, but not without side effects. Codeine reduced the pain, but it made me drowsy, which is not much use when your job involves driving large vehicles for a living.
That was the practical problem.
I could drive a car with relatively little discomfort, but I had to plan journeys around medication, so I was not impaired.
Driving a truck was another matter.
By then, I had an appointment coming with the musculoskeletal physiotherapy team. They would guide the next stage of recovery.
My workplace had been supportive. I had a welfare meeting arranged with HR and my line manager, and I hoped we could find a way forward.
Maybe I could return to the road.
Maybe I would have to do something else for a while.
Maybe, as I joked at the time, I would have to drive a desk instead of a truck.
The mental battle
The physical pain was one thing.
The mental side was something else.
Several times, I woke in the night panicking about the future. What if I could not return to work? What if I could not provide properly? What if the whole thing dragged on for months? What if I became a burden on the people I love?
Those thoughts are hard to admit.
But they were there.
I felt as if I was letting everyone down.
My employer.
My family.
Myself.
Part of me wanted to tough it out and soldier on. That old instinct is strong. Push through. Ignore it. Do not make a fuss. Get back to work.
But that could have made things worse.
If I rushed back before my body was ready, I might have done more damage. The people I spoke to all said the same thing.
Do not rush recovery.
That is easy advice to give.
It is much harder to live with when the bills still need to be paid, and your head is full of worst-case scenarios at three in the morning.
The old tools return
Once again, recovery brought me back to the same basic tools.
Food.
Fasting.
Walking, when possible.
Meditation.
Less noise.
Less social media.
More writing.
I decided to lean back into fasting and low-carbohydrate eating, not as a miracle cure, but as part of trying to reduce weight and make movement easier.
Getting below 100kg felt like a meaningful target.
Less weight on the joint.
More chance of strengthening the muscles around the hip.
More room to move.
I also reduced social media again. From the 1st of November, I limited myself to checking it on the computer once a day. Most of my writing would return to the blog.
That felt right.
When life becomes uncertain, the internet can make everything worse. More noise. More comparison. More bad news. More things to worry about.
The blog is different.
It slows me down.
It gives thoughts somewhere to land.
It turns panic into sentences.
That is not nothing.
Looking towards 2024
By the end of December, I had started thinking hard about the year ahead.
Over the previous eighteen months, I had already made major changes to my health through fasting, low-carb eating and lifestyle changes. The trinity had frightened me into action back in 2022, and those changes had worked.
Now, arthritis had joined the party.
Another problem.
Another adjustment.
Another reminder that the body keeps the score, whether the mind likes it or not.
I read about fasting again. I thought about weight loss, inflammation, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis and the relationship between food, movement and pain.
Some of the material was useful.
Some of it was probably too neat.
Real life is never as tidy as a health article.
Still, the direction felt right.
Eat in a way that helps rather than harms.
Move when I can.
Rest when I must.
Build strength slowly.
Listen to medical advice.
Stop pretending I can bully my body back into service.
That last one matters.
For years, I treated my body as something that would eventually forgive me.
It has been very patient.
Perhaps too patient.
What arthritis changed
Arthritis did not arrive as a clean lesson.
It arrived as pain.
It arrived as fear.
It arrived as a stick by the front door and a question mark over work.
But it also forced another kind of honesty.
I cannot keep living only from the neck up.
The body has a vote.
It had voted before, with blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol. In 2022, I listened because I had to.
Now the hip was speaking too.
The question was whether I could listen earlier this time.
Not wait for disaster.
Not turn every warning into a dramatic reset post.
Just do the boring work.
Rest.
Rebuild.
Lose weight.
Walk carefully.
Get stronger.
Stay useful.
Stay present.
Keep writing.
I do not yet know what will happen with the hip.
I do not know whether I will drive trucks in the same way again.
I do not know how long the recovery will take.
But I know this much.
I will not be defeated.
Until next time,
adieu.