Weeks 7-8.5

Stage 2 started with a trip to the hospital for appointments with my surgeon and a physio (unfortunately not my usual hospital physio, as he was on annual leave).

The appointment with the surgeon went really well (and was really good for my ego). He wiggled my knee around and declared himself pleased with the outcome, and said he knew I’d be a textbook patient. I asked the million-dollar question (“Will I be able to get back to running very long distances very slowly?”) and he responded as if this was a silly question: “Of course, that’s the reason why we did this”. He then told the head physio, who was attending the appointment, that I was an “elite athlete”. I don’t think of myself as any sort of athlete, but didn’t object. Standing on both feet felt really strange (my right shoe being in my rucksack rather than on my foot didn’t help), and I decided to hop rather than walk my way up to physio.

The physio appointment was less positive. The computer system hadn’t allowed the stand-in physio to access my notes, and I’m guessing I got put on a normal middle-aged woman (rather than an elite athlete…) protocol: two and a half weeks of walking with crutches around the house only, some basic exercises, no driving and no cycling. And the timescales for getting back to driving and walking normally were worryingly close to our holiday in 5 weeks. Walking was uncomfortable and very slow, and it took a lot of willpower to walk rather than hop out of the hospital.

really not sure about this walking business…

Being able to put both feet on the floor was big progress, but it was still a long way from normal. In particular, still having to carry things around in a rucksack rather than my hands was a pain. On a particularly frustrating day, I announced that I was fed up of being like “***ing Dora the ***ing Explorer”. Sleeping proved problematic again. Without the brace, I moved around too much and kept waking up in discomfort. After 2 very disrupted nights, I was seriously considering starting to wear the brace again at night, but thankfully it got better quickly after that.

The flexion in my knee increased pretty rapidly; however, I tweaked various muscles in my leg trying too hard. I also annoyed my calf by absentmindedly walking down the last step of the stairs normally (in the middle of the night while composing stressful work emails in my head…). I was meticulous about following the no weight-bearing instruction for the first 6 weeks. However, I was less rigorous about the 2.5 weeks indoors on crutches, given that the surgeon had said that his only restrictions now were no deep loaded squats and no running. We went for several very short (0.25 mile) walks with crutches outside, and around the house I sometimes took a few steps without crutches when it made things significantly easier.

Weeks 8.5-11.5

The next appointment with the stand-in physio went much better. I deliberately wore one of my most ‘not an average middle-aged woman’ race T-shirts. Nigel also did his part. His 145 degrees of flexion was declared “phenomenal” (full flexion for normal, non-hypermobile, people is 135 degrees), and we were cleared to drive, wean ourselves off the crutches and then gently push Nigel's limits. Most of the new exercises I was given were really easy (glute bridges, standing on one leg), but single-leg heel raises provided some much-wanted challenge.

trying to look like 'not your average middle aged woman'

I left the hospital on a single crutch, which I ditched within 24 hours. I embraced my newfound freedom and went (on my own!) to a gong bath, and also into the office for the first time in 2 months. Walking was initially very slow and uncomfortable, but over two weeks I went from being able to do 1 mile in 25 minutes, to 3.5 miles in an hour (my usual ‘comfortably fast’ walking pace is 4 mph). I also managed a short walk on the moors to say hello to some sheep.

sheep and a trigpoint

Now I was 'back to everyday normal', we got the house back to normal, including packing away lots of books and completed sewing. The leg ache from the overenthusiastic hamstring curls eased, but my calf became very tight, and I started getting discomfort on the outside of my knee on initially putting weight through it. If felt similar to what I experienced pre-surgery, so part of my brain screamed “ahhh, the repair has failed already”. However it's eased and I think/hope it’s just a sign of a tight calf muscle.

2 non-mobile months worth of reading material, a cushion cover and the first 3 (of 20…) panels of the next project

Stage 2 ended with with an appointment with the original hospital physio. He was impressed and surprised by what I was managing to do, to the extent that I was worried that I'd misinterpreted the stand-in physios instructions. But since I'm not experiencing pain, and Nigel isn't swollen, it's all good. Apparently it normally takes 5 months to get to where we are. For now there are no new exercises but when I get back from holiday in 2 and a bit weeks time the gym work starts.

The backstory…

… is spread across various blogs (Viadal 6 day: pre-race and LAU: pre-adventure & the next big thing? rehab), but here’s a short summary. After several months of niggles in my right leg, my knee gave way while running on a treadmill. For several days I couldn’t bear weight on a bent leg. It initially seemed to get better fairly quickly, but running, or indeed anything other than moving forwards slowly in a straight line on a level surface, made it angry. Nearly a year after the initial injury (having managed to finish the Lapland Arctic Ultra in the meantime), I finally got a diagnosis: a radial meniscus tear extending into the medial posterior root. Initially, I was under the impression it wasn’t repairable (and I’d need a knee replacement in the near future); however, it turned out that it was.

Week -1

The 10-day gap between being told that a repair was possible and it actually happening was perfect. Just enough time to get everything organised, both at work and at home, without rushing. We bought various useful things (more about them at the end of this blog), and generally figured out how day-to-day life was going to work with one functional leg. This including practising using crutches. I initially wasn't sure about getting up the two steps into our house. However the OH, who spent a few weeks on crutches as a teenager, demonstrated how to do it, and 'if he can do it, so can I' was sufficient motivation. I had to go to the hospital for MRSA swabs, and was issued with 'decontamination wash' to use daily, which my hair really didn't like.

decontaminated!

D-Day

After admission at 11 am, there was then lots of talking to different people (surgeon, anaesthetist, physio, doctor dispensing medicine, nurse administering a pregnancy test…) and waiting around before the operation finally took place mid-afternoon. I opted to have a general anaesthetic, mainly because I hadn’t realised that being conscious was an option and hadn’t got my head around that possibility in advance. I came round quite quickly and somehow ended up having a conversation with the anaesthetist about Brian Cox (I once ate breakfast at the same table as him at a conference).

There were then several more hours of waiting before I was deemed sufficiently recovered and mobile to go home, with a large bag of medication (paracetamol, codeine, morphine, blood thinners and two different laxatives…). I was wheeled out to the OH’s car and bum-shuffled my way onto the back seat. Thanks to practising in advance, I happily hopped my way up the steps into the house, and then stopped concentrating and nearly kicked one of my crutches out from under me. The OH was tired after a long day, but I was apparently ‘high as a kite’ and insisted on sitting in a chair and eating mashed potato before going to bed.

Week 1

I don’t remember much about week 1. At the time I thought I was fairly ‘with it’, but in retrospect I wasn’t. Fortunately, the OH was able to work from home, so he was able to bring me food and medication. All I had to do was crutch my way between the bedroom, the sofa, and the toilet, and pass the time doing my exercises, watching television, surfing the web, reading, sewing and napping. With the Tour de France coming up, we took out an HBO Max/TNT subscription, so I had plenty of random sports to watch. Fortunately, various blogs forewarned me that post-surgery life on crutches would take a lot of energy, and the downtime wouldn’t be the opportunity for indulging in sedentary hobbies that you might naively think.

The hospital physio had given me a leaflet of exercises and told me to aim for 90 degrees of heel-slide flexion by the 2-week follow-up appointment. True to girly swot form, I had my first go at the exercises before getting out of bed (but post-espresso…) on day 1. The instructions said to use your hands to gently move your leg to start with, so I did, and it bent to 90 degrees easily. I then did it without hands. 90 degrees again easily. The other exercises, including straight leg raises, went similarly smoothly.

Initially, I followed the discharge instructions to take paracetamol and codeine at regular intervals, but after a few days I tapered off first the codeine and then the paracetamol, since I wasn’t actually in any pain most of the time. The one exception was at night. I’m a restless (violent even…) sleeper, so sleeping on my back with my leg in a brace was a challenge. I’d often fall asleep fairly easily, but then get woken up by sharp electric shock-like pains (which morphine didn’t help with) after trying to roll onto my side. It would then take several hours to get back to sleep again.

Week 2

Having spent all of week 1 wearing the same clothes for 24 hours, I returned to civilisation and started wearing ‘night’ and ‘day’ clothes, including a bra during the day. The bra turned out to be very useful for carrying small items, e.g. espresso cups, packets of crisps, toothbrushes. Running shorts were also practical for going to the loo; short baggy ones with built-in pants for days at home, and longer 2-in-1 shorts on rare days out, to avoid inflicting my thighs on other people. On the subject of thighs, the shorts made me painfully aware of the increasing size of my thighs and stomach. I tried to strike a balance between avoiding excessive comfort eating while acknowledging that some weight gain would be inevitable, sensible even, since resticting calories would not be conducive to recovery (or happiness).

Showering was a twice a week military operation. First I'd have to undress, which involved taking the brace off and then putting it back on, before we wrestled a waterproof full-leg cast cover (it became known as 'the leg condom') onto my leg. Then I'd hop my way through to the bathroom, sit on a chair, bum-shuffle along the edge of the bath and finally transfer myself onto a rotating shower stool. After showering with the OH's help this process then had to be reversed.

We set up a toasting station on the kitchen table so that I could make myself breakfast and lunch. Not just on days when the OH had to go into the office, but so that I could feel a bit more independent in general. A small zip-up OMM backpack (often worn on my front like a backpacker) proved useful for carrying around items that were too large to fit down my bra. Every trip off the sofa required forethought, like arriving at a checkpoint in a multiday race (‘What do I need to do?’ ‘What’s the best order to do it in?’). By the middle of the week, I was sufficiently bored and alert to unofficially do some very light work (reading some of my very large ‘papers to read’ backlog).

We went on our first lunch trip outing and nearly bit off more than we could (metaphorically) chew. We decided to go to a cafe in a park with a car park. Unfortunately, the short walk from the car park (which I’ve run on many occasions) was close to a quarter of a mile, which is a long way to essentially hop. And one of the two benches on the way was (it turned out when I tried to sit on it) broken. With lots of standing rest breaks, we made it to and from the cafe without mishap, but the food was crap (a supermarket bread roll filled with nothing but cheap cheese, followed by ice cream with ice in). But I was left with a sore shoulder for several days, and if I hadn’t had to devote all of my energy to hopping, I might have attacked the bloke who told the OH that he’d deserve a break after looking me with my crutches…

The week ended with a trip to the hospital to get the stitches removed and see the physio. Apparently my knee mobility was where it should be 6 weeks post-surgery, and when we told the physio that Nigel knee had been bending to 90 degrees since day 1, he declared it ‘unprecedented’. The surgeon should get the credit for that, but I’ll take the credit for my ‘excellent single-leg balance’. This was all great news, but I’d gone in expecting to be given new exercises and to have the range of motion of the brace increased, so I was a bit disappointed to be told ‘keep doing what you’re doing for the next 4 weeks’.

Naming your injured body part was one of the things that the (somewhat American) book 'Rebound: train your mind to bounce back stronger from sports injuries' recommended. It felt a bit silly, but I think it did help me depersonalise the injury and not get frustrated with the knee. Over the weeks Nigel developed the personality of a sulky teenage boy, who'd rather lie on the sofa than do his exercises.

Week 3

I officially started working part-time, horizontally on the sofa or sitting on the bed (I realised early on that doing meetings lying on the sofa led to a double chin, and the bed was better for sitting upright). The nurse who did my discharge letter put ‘2-6 weeks’, rather than ‘6 weeks’, next to ‘return to work’ after I told her it would just be meetings and emails and promised to take it easy. It took me all of the first day to catch up on emails, which left me surprisingly tired. Later in the week, light upper-body weight lifting two days in a row wiped me out again.

Sleeping became easier, as I was able to sleep lying on either side. And I eventually worked out how to move from one position to another without waking myself up too much.This week included my birthday and another disappointing lunch trip out, to a cafe on the Chesterfield Canal that I’ve run past hundreds (literally) of times. It was advertised as accessible, but there was a steepish slope from the uneven gravel car park, and the elderly clientele weren’t particularly sensitive/alert to the challenges of being on crutches. And the food was only marginally better than last week’s.

Towards the end of the week, I had my first low patch. I think due to putting too much emphasis on being ‘nearly halfway through’, when there was still a long way to go.

Week 4-6

I hadn’t ventured out into the back garden because the doorstep was too wide and high to hop over. However, on a Sunny day when the OH was out at work, I decided to give it a go. I can’t quite do a proper pistol squat. But with something solid to hold onto, it turned out I could do a single-leg squat down, butt-shuffle over the doorstep and then stand back up on the single leg. 30 min outside on my own felt like a big adventure (the lack of independence and ‘possibility’ was the thing I found hardest). At the weeked, when the OH was at home, I ventured out into the garden for longer. The OH came out and moved me as the Sun moved. This was very thoughful, but made me feel like a rather fragile garden gnome. I also butt-shuffled my way upstairs for a little bit of one-legged gong and singing bowl playing. [I was very lucky that we have a downstairs en-suite bedroom with AC, so in general I could live downstairs.]

A spider provided an unexpected challenge. I have a deal with the OH: he's scared of spiders and I'm scared of snakes, so removing spiders from the house is my job, while dealing with snakes is (or would hypothetically be) mine. One evening there was a giant spider sat on the stairs. Scooping it up and taking it outside wasn't possible, so instead I gently squashed it with a crutch. As I bent over (balanced on one leg) to pick up the body, it unfurled itself and scurried up my arm. I managed to shake it off without falling over, and then (to avoid further mishaps) beat it to death with a crutch.

I got the hang of pacing myself, and time passed, with weekdays spent mostly working, and evenings and weekends watching cycling, athletics and football, sewing, and reading (in particular, about the physics of music). There was, however, another low patch, when I spent 10 days entirely at home/in the garden between lunch trips out. And there was more than one frustrating work meeting where it would have been very tempting to hit the barely touched morphine bottle.

The next big step (both literally and metaphorically) is tomorrow, when I see the surgeon and physio to start weight-bearing. Having counted down first weeks and then days, I’m now somewhat nervous. Beginning to get my normal life and independence back will be fantastic. But full recovery is not going to be a quick or linear process. The one plus side of stage 1 was that the duration (6 weeks) and what was possible (very little) were both fixed.

Useful reading material

The aforementioned book: Rebound: train your mind to bounce back stronger from sports injuries

I’ve been reading Jill Homer’s blog/substack for many years, and she had a very similar injury (albeit with much worse initial consequences) earlier this year. Also Sophie Speidel on Substack and Alyssa Godesky on Instagram.

Useful things

IKEA trolley: the most valuable player, allowed me to keep the essentials of everyday life easily to hand.

Waterproof full-leg cast cover: kept the wound and brace dry while showering.

Cheap Amazon crutches: let me practice hopping around and in and out of the house, and also work out the logistics of going to the loo pre-surgery. Post-surgery, they were useful as a 2nd upstairs pair of crutches.

IKEA plastic chair: multiple uses: butt-shuffling into the bath for washing, resting my leg on when doing weights, sitting on to talk to our guinea pigs…

Table top ice making machine: much easier than crutching to the freezer every 2 hours for ice.

360-degree swivel shower chair (actually used it with an over-bath shower attachment).

Charity shop ‘fireside’ chair: I thought I’d spend a lot of time sitting in this with my leg on a footstool, but lying on the sofa was more comfy. It was useful for drinking espresso, though.

Overbed table with wheels: didn’t use this as much as I anticipated, but it was useful for occasionally writing and drawing up sewing patterns.

Cycling gloves: to avoid my hands getting sore on trips out.

• Stage 1: 6 weeks non weight-bearing

• Stage 2: relearning to walk

In the days after the race, lots of people asked me, “What’s the next big thing?” An entirely reasonable question, since in the past I’ve always had a ‘next big thing’. I’d answer “there isn’t, this was the big thing”, and struggle to explain that this wasn’t just another challenge ticked off, it was a quasi-spiritual experience.

I didn't get the usual 'post-big race' blues. However, I did keep crying lots, in particular (and most embarrassingly) while watching 'The Finisher' (the documentary about Jasmin Paris' Berkeley Marathons finish) at the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival. Unsurprisingly, after a couple of weeks, I did start thinking about my next, Arctic, adventure. Years ago, I’d thought that a European Arctic ultra would be a step to doing one of the events in the Yukon. But my body’s reaction to the low temperatures on day one of the training course confirmed my feeling that my middle-aged female body doesn’t handle the cold well enough any more for this to be sensible. I wish I’d been able to do an Arctic event (and discover how much I love the Arctic) sooner, but there’s a limit to how much can be fitted into a single life. Even without the training course, the full Lapland 500 km requires too much time off in term time to normally be viable for me. Doing the 185 km race, which just covers the 1st loop, is a possibility, but it was the solitude of the 2nd loop that I loved.

After a few weeks, I started dreaming about, and researching, backcountry skiing across Svalbard (something that several people on the training course had done). I did a little bit of cross-country skiing when I lived in Sweden, but I’ve never downhill skied, and my approach to slowing down on descents was to fall over sideways (and once backwards, leading to a ‘broken’ tailbone). I bought books on Svalbard, found companies that ran trips and training courses in Norway, and almost got to the point of booking some skiing lessons on a nearby indoor ski slope. However, before doing that, I thought I should try to address the knee injury and get back to running. With more spare time, I’d been catching up on jobs around the house, and putting weight through it at odd angles (rather than moving slowly forwards in a straight line) kept making it twinge.

The last month or so has been a rollercoaster of wildly varying diagnoses and prognoses. I first saw a physio at my usual practice (the White House in Sheffield) who does ultrasound imaging. The ultrasound didn’t show anything abnormal, and the only obvious issue he could find was very tight muscles around the knee joint. He said there was nothing that indicated that an MRI would be sensible at this point, and suggested I see one of the other physios who specialise in leg issues. Cheered by this, I made an appointment with the physio who’d provided my Arctic strength and conditioning schedule and did a tentative 30 min of alternating running with walking. The running felt weird, but not painful. The next day, the knee was grumpy, though. And a few days later, at the end of a not-too-long stroll in the Peak District, a rocky descent made it decidedly angry.

At the next physio appointment, another careful examination of my knee revealed a potential meniscus tear, which might or might not need surgery, and an MRI was suggested. At this point, I was mainly relieved that I’d managed to convince someone that there was something wrong (and I wasn’t just being a wuss), and to know what it probably was. I got the MRI done, privately, a week later and was expecting to have to wait up to a week for the results. However, the next day, in a gap between appointments, the physio phoned me to break some very bad news. It was a meniscus tear, but a worse one than he’d thought (a radial tear through the posterior horn with extension to the posterior meniscal root, with partial extrusion of the body of the meniscus into the medial joint line). My memory of the phone call is fuzzy, but I got the impression that because of the position, repair wouldn’t be possible, and the best-case scenario would be trimming it to delay the onset of severe arthritis (thankfully, despite having walked quite a lot on it in the last year, only mild arthritis has developed so far). He strongly recommended talking to a surgeon and suggested a couple of specific people at Sheffield Orthopaedics. I tried not to get too carried away with Google/ChatGPT doctoring, but over the weekend, the significance of the injury (an eventual knee replacement and no running) sank in.

Due partly to work commitments, it was a couple of weeks before I got an appointment with one of the recommended orthopaedic consultants. I’d originally been planning on walking the LDWA Hunnypot 100 in the meantime. However a LDWA 100 didn’t seem like a great use of the remaining ‘life’ of my knee, so instead I spent a couple of days (legal) wild camping in the Yorkshire Dales. I’d intended to spend time reading in the Sun, but due to broken reading glasses and a surprising amount of wind, I came home early. On the train home, a migraine (my first in over a decade) started. Fortunately, I got home before the vomiting started and was only sick 3 times in an hour before falling asleep (in the past, I’d regularly have hours of intense pain and vomiting). My migraines are stress-induced, and on top of the knee injury, there’s a lot of very bad stuff going on at work (for particle physics and astronomy nationally, the whole of the University of Nottingham, and Nottingham physics specifically). Most of my colleagues, including some research superstars, have received ‘at risk of redundancy’ letters, but (so far at least…) to my huge relief, I haven’t, thanks, I think, to the research fellowship which allowed me to do the Arctic race.

Unlike all of the other medical professionals I’ve seen in the past few years, the consultant didn’t start the appointment by telling me how old I am. Instead, he asked me about my activity levels and what I’d like the outcome to be. “Up until a year ago, I was running multi-day ultras. I’d love to get back to that, but I’m guessing that’s not possible. The thing that’s really important to me is being able to continue covering long distances in the hills on foot for as long as possible.” (I’d given a lot of thought to this over the last few weeks.) To my surprise, he told us (the OH had come along for moral support and to take notes) that he could repair it. Apparently, it’s something that some surgeons have started doing in some cases relatively recently, so there’s limited data on how long the repairs last, but without a repair, I’ll likely need a knee replacement within 5 years. This sort of tear is common in middle-aged women with high BMIs (it usually happens when stepping onto a curb), and the high BMI and already severe arthritis mean repair isn’t viable. I have, however, found on the internet several 40-60-something female ultra runners who’ve had similar tears repaired.

I’d gone into the appointment expecting to be able to fit the 8-week recovery from a meniscus trim in between some work travel in mid June and our planned holiday in Japan in early September. Working out how to fit in the more major recovery from a repair, including 6 weeks of no weight bearing, was a bit trickier. I asked about postponing the surgery until December, but was advised that sooner would be better. We went home, and within a few hours, I decided to cancel my upcoming work travel and schedule the surgery ASAP to give me the best chance of being somewhat mobile by the end of Summer. (I was supposed to be at a dark matter workshop in Pollica in Italy this week, and at CERN the week after, for a primordial black hole workshop and also to give a seminar to the theory division.)

I haven’t yet asked the million-dollar questions (not just “Will I be able to run again?” But “If so, will multi-day running significantly increase the risk of the repair failing?”). In the ~ 2 weeks between the MRI and the appointment with the consultant, I’d sort of come to terms with having to give up on my six-day running targets (400 miles and then, maybe, in a few years’ time, the British women’s over 55 record). In the last two decades, I’ve done multiple things I didn’t think I was capable of (finishing the (full Winter…) Spine in 2014, respectable finishes at various multi-day races and getting tantalisingly close to 400 miles in 6 days). Being somewhat slow, I was always more focused on challenges than competition, and over the last few years, challenges have evolved into projects and adventures. And for the next 6+ months, the project is rehab, to hopefully allow me to keep on having adventures on foot.

Being in a car travelling at what felt like high speed on icy roads was very surreal, and I suddenly felt very tired. Back at Jockfall, I was driven right up to one of the chalets, and Pulkee was unloaded for me. The restaurant was just about to close for the evening, so I had a very quick shower before eating, replying to some messages and collapsing into bed.

After sleeping through the night, I then spent the morning dozing, picking the Never Stops out of my remaining snack bags and eating the sweets I’d been given at the finish (I’d half-planned to pop to the supermarket in Överkallix after finishing to stock up on non-race food, but didn’t have the time and energy to do it). I also surfed the web, and cried. Not happy or sad tears, but an overwhelming ‘oh my god I actually did it’ feeling. When photos of me finishing were posted on the internet, it felt like the person in them wasn’t me (they were far too athletic-looking to be me).

After a large lunch, I started trying to organise and pack my gear, but I kept running out of steam. I also had to be careful about how I moved, as my knee was somewhat unhappy. The rest of my body was in pretty good shape. Various bits of chafing had cleared up significantly with airing overnight, and my feet looked almost normal. The worst damage was actually to my hands; the insides of both thumbs were somewhat numb, and the 3rd, 4th and 5th fingers on my left hand would seize up into a claw if I didn't use them for a while (presumably an after effect of gripping trekking poles). That evening, there was a post-race party. I went along for a bit. It was good to catch up with various people, but it was all a bit much for me (in particular, the noise), and I went back to the lodge to finally finish packing.

foot looking pretty good

Most people left early the next morning, but I decided to split my journey over two days again, so the OH could pick me and Pulkee up from Manchester on Friday evening. Despite having a full separate holdall and, I thought, less in her than on the way out, Pulkee was significantly overweight. I didn’t have the energy to rearrange stuff, so I paid the excess baggage fee (that I’d put so much effort into avoiding on the way out). There were lots of military planes noisily taking off and landing at Lulea airport. I spent the long journey catching up on emails and eating lots. That’s not cheap when you’re at airports in a Nordic country, but I did get more than my money’s worth from the hotel buffet breakfast. Despite all the eating I was feeling rather thin; when I got home I was 59 kg, 4 kg ligher than when I left. (My body weight fixed point has drifted up 4 or 5 kg over the last few years, thanks to weight lifting (and also middle aged spread…)).

a midriff fit for a 90s girl band, and refueling on airport food

The plane from Stockholm to Manchester was full of the loudest drunken Swedes I’ve ever encountered (on their way to something football related, I think). A group of them tried to barge past us into a lift, but Pulkee was a very effective block. The OH had stocked the car up with Pringles and HobNobs, but I got through the hour and a bit journey home without needing to eat again. As usual after overseas multi-day events, the worst of the tiredness only hit when I got home. The first night, I woke up with no idea where I was. Unlike post-Spine, I didn’t panic. I reassured myself that wherever I was, it was warm and dry, so I could go back to sleep and figure it out later. When I woke up properly later on, I was lying diagonally across the bed, with my head at the bottom… The other hindrance to ‘getting back to normal life’, was my head continuing to play its 90s indie playlist. It’s hard to concentrate on meetings and emails when your head insists on playing the Leveller’s ‘One way of life’…