HKT

January to November 2024

This piece gathers the main personal health and work posts from 2024. It was a year of returning, relapsing, adjusting, worrying, working, gaining weight, losing rhythm, facing the hip properly, then getting knocked sideways by Covid. Not a clean recovery. More of a loop.

Again

I started thinking about 2024 around the winter solstice.

That felt fitting.

There had been plenty of challenges for my family and me during 2023. Some we overcame. Others caused proper upheaval. By the time the new year arrived, I knew what needed most of my attention.

Health.

Not in the vague, new-year-new-me sense.

In the practical sense.

Could I get well enough to work?
Could I lose the weight I had regained?
Could I keep earning?
Could I stop my arthritic hip from dictating the shape of every day?

I had been off work for almost three months. In that time, my hip had improved a little, but I had also gained weight. Birthdays, Christmas, comfort food and worry had all done their work.

A coping mechanism, probably.

But a costly one.

So, on the 1st of January, I went back to what I knew had worked before.

Time-restricted eating.
Low-carbohydrate food.
As much walking as the hip would allow.
Daily attention.
No waiting for perfect conditions.

I also needed to get back to work as soon as possible. Not for pride. Not for heroics. Simply to avoid a financial disaster early in the year.

What that work would look like was not yet clear.

But I had to find a way.

Back on track, sort of

My first attempt to return to work after the arthritis flare-up hit a roadblock.

I had been cleared to return to light duties, but the company did not have suitable work for me. That left me at home on statutory sick pay, which was nowhere near enough to live on.

That was hard to swallow.

I had done everything by the book. I had reported what the doctors and medical team told me. I had followed the process. I had tried to be honest.

Then I sat at home worrying about money.

Part of me wondered whether I should have just sucked it up and said I was fine to return to truck driving.

Lesson learned, perhaps.

There was a possible route back. I could be redeployed within the company as a mobile seed plant operator. That sounded interesting. Farm work. Preparing grain to be used as seed crops. Practical, useful, and still connected to the world I had been working in.

The wheels turned slowly.

A trial day appeared.

A chance to meet people, see the work, and find out whether it might suit me.

At that point, any movement felt welcome.

Summer reset

By May, I had returned to work.

It had taken almost four months of recovery, uncertainty and waiting, but I was back driving trucks.

The trouble was that it felt different.

Harder than before.

The work was still the work, but the atmosphere around it seemed more fractured. Less camaraderie. More cliques. More stress. More noise.

I had also applied for an internal transport manager role. Despite having over a decade of management experience, I was told I did not have enough management experience.

That annoyed me.

It also added stress I did not need.

Being away from home, at my age, with my medical conditions and the hip still in the background, had started to feel heavier. Work had become something I needed to manage carefully rather than simply endure.

That was where the lesson from the unpublished “rhythm of now” idea came in.

I did not need to win every argument.

I did not need to absorb every workplace mood.

I did not need to answer every phone call, join every conversation, or get pulled into every bit of politics.

I needed boundaries.

Plan the day.
Stay calm.
Avoid drama.
Document what matters.
Choose battles carefully.
Do the job.
Go home.

That sounds simple, but simple things often take effort.

So I started staying in my own bubble.

Books.
Podcasts.
Music.
Less phone chatter.
Less workplace politics.
More attention to what was in front of me.

It made the job lonelier in some ways.

But it also made it survivable.

Weight creeping back

The other problem was harder to ignore.

My weight was going back up.

Being off work for several months had reduced the amount of walking I could do. The arthritis had slowed me down. Returning to truck driving did not help much either. Long hours, sitting, stress, tiredness and food choices all started pulling me in the wrong direction.

There was no point pretending otherwise.

Some of it was circumstance.

Some of it was laziness.

Both things can be true.

So I made another plan.

Time-restricted eating again.
Low-carb or keto eating again.
A long walk every day, rain or shine, as far as the hip would allow.
Less stress.
Less sugar.
More structure.

I wanted to be under 100kg by the time we went to Germany at the end of July.

That was the target.

Whether I hit it or not, I needed the direction.

Backwards

By August, the numbers had moved the wrong way.

At my annual diabetes review, the nurse was not happy.

My weight was up.
My cholesterol was up.
Other markers had gone in the wrong direction.

I was told to start taking Metformin at a low dose.

That was not what I wanted.

But if it helped me shift weight and get control of the diabetes again, I was in.

The nurse also wanted me back on a statin for cholesterol. I wanted to wait before doing that and try food changes first. Less full-fat dairy. Less red meat. Less sugar. More discipline.

The bigger picture was clear.

I wanted to live as long as possible.

Being overweight, bloated, diabetic and dealing with joint pain was not the path to that.

I was 125kg.

Fuck.

The target was to get below 90kg and return the diabetes to remission within eighteen months.

That was a big ask.

But it gave the work a shape.

I also had a few mental health challenges circling in the background. Nothing neat. Nothing dramatic for effect. Just the familiar weight of worry, pain, tiredness and frustration.

The focus had to shift towards self-care.

Not as a slogan.

As a requirement.

Hip-h-op

Then came the hip news.

“You have a large bone spur that has developed at the joint margin of your hip.”

The clinician at the Community Orthopaedic Team appointment took only a few minutes to explain that my severe arthritis diagnosis now had an extra twist.

I asked what that meant going forward.

He explained what was happening inside the joint, and panic began creeping in.

The condition was not going to improve without surgery.

That changed the way I looked at everything.

Pain was one thing.
I could work around pain for a while.

But a joint that needed surgery was different.

My mind went straight to the frightening places. Surgery. Anaesthetic. Recovery. Work. Money. Pain. The possibility of being awake while someone worked on my hip. The loss of control. The unknown.

Rhona thinks I am a big girly wuss.

She is probably right.

But fear is fear.

I wanted the best possible outcome for a man of my age and weight. That meant learning what I could, understanding the options, listening to the medical people, and trying not to catastrophise every unknown detail.

Easier said than done.

So I did what I usually do.

I wrote about it.

This place became the diary again. The pressure valve. The place to process the thoughts I could not keep carrying around in my head.

By all accounts, I was going to have plenty of time to think.

Covid vortex

Then Covid arrived.

Again.

If I thought it was going to let me off with a week of sneezing and watching television, I was wrong.

It started with the usual symptoms.

Headache.
Fever.
Chills.
Loss of taste.
That strange, flattened feeling Covid brings with it.

Then the main illness passed, but the leftovers stayed.

Fatigue.
Brain fog.
Dizziness.

The fatigue was not normal tiredness. It did not lift after sleep. Some days, I could get up, do a few small things, then feel as if the day had already beaten me.

The brain fog was worse.

Words disappeared. Thoughts slipped away mid-sentence. Simple tasks took more effort than they should have. I felt like a low-budget version of myself, slow, glitchy and slightly out of sync with the world.

Then came the dizziness.

Walking to the kitchen could feel like crossing the deck of a ship in rough weather. Stairs needed thought. Supermarket aisles became unpleasant. Some moments required me to grab the nearest solid object and wait for the world to stop moving.

Writing through it was hard.

Sentences fought back.

But writing it down still mattered.

It was a way of saying that I was not back to normal, but I was crawling towards it.

What the loop showed me

Looking back, 2024 did not move in a straight line.

It looped.

Recovery.
Return.
Stress.
Weight gain.
Reset.
Bad numbers.
Medication.
Hip fear.
Covid.
Another reset.

There were no clean victories.

But there were lessons.

Work needed boundaries, not more rumination.

Health needed daily attention, not another dramatic promise.

The hip needed respect, not denial.

Food had to become boringly useful again.

The internet needed to stay smaller.

Writing needed to remain close.

Family still had to be the centre of everything.

The hardest part was accepting that recovery is not a single event. It is not one decision, one diet, one appointment, one return to work, or one brave post about beginning again.

It is repetition.

Doing the useful thing again.
And again.
And again.

Even when tired.
Even when sore.
Even when frightened.
Even when progress feels slow.

That was the recovery loop.

Not glamorous.

Not tidy.

But real.

Until next time,

adieu.