I'm hurt

In my last blog entry, I posted a little bit about some of the issues I've been having with repetitive strain injuries and I mentioned my back, very briefly. That did become a bigger problem almost immediately afterwards, as I feared. 

Image courtesy of a friend of mine who is an ER nurse. It's not ideal.

There was a series of diagnostics and back-and-forth between this doctor and that one and lots of second and third opinions, but what I basically ended up with was that I've got the spine of somebody in their 60s and a few slightly complex problems that won't be going away without surgery. The goal is to get everything very strong indeed through physiotherapy, keep the inflammation down, and keep everything as mobile as I can to delay surgery by a few years. 

I also want to be very vulnerable here and say that I ended up with somewhat of a dependence on tramadol, which was an extremely frightening couple of months for me and Andy and the people around us. When you're in incredible pain you'll do almost anything to get out of it again - but that's a road that was an extreme dead-end. Over 10 days around Christmas, with a lot of social support, I was able to discontinue use. With corticosteroid injections the pain is under much better control, but still present. There are good days and bad days. 

I'm doing physio and being as diligent as I can with my self-care, but this has taken me out of competitive bouting for some time now and I am feeling very vulnerable about it. I know chronic injury and pain is not an uncommon feature of fighters. I've heard a lot of sympathetic stories from folks who have been out for six months, a year, two years or even more - but impatience and impulsiveness are probably my worst qualities, and this is absolutely killing me. 

I had all kinds of performance goals for this year. There were so many things I really thought I was going to be able to accomplish. I may or may not get there, but I'm going to change focus for now. 2024 is going to be about doing what I can to build and maintain the community, supporting he performance goals of other fencers, and becoming well-rounded in ways that don't necessarily require competitive success.