Aches and pains - forty love!

I have developed tennis elbow!

Stop laughing! No, I mean it, stop it! I really have, which is ironic seeing as I haven’t picked up a tennis racquet for about 40 years. I have a searing pain on the outer edge of my elbow which is worse with repetitive activity. I looked it up on the internet and in a fantastic medical encyclopaedia we have, which I got free with tokens from about a million editions of the Daily Mail a few years ago.

By the way, it’s a huge mistake to get one of those medical books. You find yourself looking up every ache and pain you experience and convincing yourself that you have all sorts of life threatening conditions. You go to the doctor’s with a small amount of knowledge and try to tell them their job, which must not only be incredibly irritating but also dangerous. You do it to your family too, diagnosing their ailments with an air of authority which is quite misplaced.

Anyway, I do, genuinely, have tennis elbow. And it hurts. Apparently you get it from repetitive movements normally associated with strenuous activity and sports (The Hubby nearly fell off his chair laughing when I told him that bit). It can be painful and there is very little the medics can do about it beyond a bit of physio, and to be honest I can’t really be bothered with that seeing as you can get all the appropriate exercises off the internet on the NHS site. I certainly don’t want to claim on my insurance for it, and if I wait for the NHS to give me physio I will grow old a die first.

Everything I have read says that usually it gets better on its own, so I will just have to try and do the exercises, strap the damn thing up with Tubigrip and get on with it. And it is a good excuse not to have to carry things, meaning I can get The Hubby and the kids to actually clear their own plates and fetch their own stuff instead of being waited on (to be fair, The Hubby doesn’t expect to be, but the kids can be phenomenally lazy).

When you get some minor ailment like this it is amazing how debilitating and limiting it can be, and you realise how much we take the strength and flexibility of our limbs for granted. And what makes it worse is there is nothing outwardly to show for it – no plaster cast, often no bandage, no bruising and no blood. A slight knock on the tube or train and the pain is extraordinary – how can such a small sinewy part of our body as the end of a tendon cause so much trouble?

When I told The Hubby I had tennis elbow, his amusement was quite unseemly and unsupportive. He is of the view that I am falling apart at the seams due to my slothful lifestyle and will be able to leave my body to medical science, where they will use it for research into couch potatoes who eat too much chocolate and drink too much wine. That is an assessment I consider grossly unfair, seeing as I do everything in the house and lots of the gardening since he isn’t there because he is toiling away 60 hours a week in some boring committee room at work and he never sees the effort that goes in. The house is clean, the garden immaculate, the household admin is done, social events are arranged, there is food in the fridge and clean clothes in the wardrobe. It is true that when he gets home I am usually on the sofa with a glass of wine and bar of Dairy Milk, but that is often about 10pm and I have only sat down an hour or so before.

I am getting fed up to the back teeth (a part of my body, by the way, which has given me no trouble of late) of having minor ailments, and the day when I get up and nothing hurts or is injured cannot come soon enough. I keep promising myself that I will put an exercise regime in place to get fit, and something always seems to get in the way and prevent it. Therefore my fitness regime (of which more in another blog to come soon) has not really progressed.

When I get back from my holiday, I have two months with no commitments. I will hopefully, by then, be feeling wholly fit and will be able to get back walking and to the gym. Hopefully and hope, as they say, springs eternal!