It’s been six weeks since I had a little Indian fella drill holes in my shoulder and insert an implant. It still hurts but only when people slap me on the shoulder in greeting or hug him and squeeze my shoulder. So I have been careful to keep huggers and slappers at bay. A few have slipped through and I have squealed in pain and made them feel really guilty for hurting me. That’s the trouble when I have ditched my sling.
I still look ok but my arm doesn’t even go to 90% yet. I have been getting some physiotherapy at the London Health Centre just down the road. The gym is full of all sorts of instruments of torture. The physiotherapist is careful not to inflict too much pain at the moment – I think more pain is coming though when we get through this first phase.
When I saw my surgeon in Dar a few weeks ago he seemed pleased with progress and gave me a plan for recovery for the next five months! Five bloody months – OMG – that is a long time to be disabled. He talked me through the plan and so that I didn’t have to commit it to memory he wrote it on a scrap of paper.
There’s something heroic about having your recovery plan hurriedly scrawled on a scrap of paper, barely legible. In any case, my Tanzanian physio has mostly ignored it and done her own thing. I don’t know who best to put my trust in – the surgeon or the physio.
But the long and short is that the arm is improving every day and I am now able to pick up a glass of beer from a bar top and put it to my lips so things are looking up.
I am doing physio on my own religiously three days a day so that I can be fit and strong enough to pack my bags and move out of Tanzania for good. That’s my motivation to recover. And when people ask me how I injured myself my reply is always – while yacht racing – which is probably true although I cannot be 100% sure when and where it happened as it was damaged for a number of months before I sought help.
Informed wisdom says it was probably as a result of hanging off a boat with one arm holding on. I’ll take that!