Holy moly Readers, no sooner had I ventured out for a much-needed haircut this afternoon when I found myself turning an ankle on the (admittedly very uneven) pavements outside my house. It was my right ankle (again) which I scrunched very thoroughly a few months ago, after I stood up from the sofa and keeled over because my leg had gone dead. What is going on here?
a) There is definitely too much time spent sitting hunched over a text book. Why o why do I never learn that I need to actually stand up and move about on a regular basis?
b) I need to redouble my pilates effort and get those ankles strengthened, though I suspect I’m hypermobile and so my joints are always going to be a bit of a problem. Still, nothing wrong with building up the muscles around them.
c) The menopause – apparently women have far more falls once they’re post menopausal. Whether it’s due to the change in hormones or a general tendency to become more sedentary later in life is unclear (though I do know many, many women who are way past the menopause who seem to be able to stay upright, so it’s clearly not destiny)
d) I was having some problems with numb feet, but this seems to have resolved itself over the past few months – I did lots and lots of walking in Canada and somehow it seems to have sorted itself out. There’s a hint there about what I should be doing to help myself, I think. I am still waiting for an appointment with podiatry on the NHS, but we all know that they’re struggling at the moment.
e) I hadn’t thought about it, but I should definitely get my eyes tested (though in truth I very rarely look where I’m going as, like Ronald Searle and Geoffrey Willans’s Fotherington Thomas, in the Molesworth books, I am often distracted.
f) And before anyone says it, I should probably get a thorough health check, though I have had a lot of hospital visits for other ‘stuff’ just lately. My persistent cough back in November sent me off down the 2-week referral cancer track – my tests for that came back clear, but I had a CT scan that spotted other interesting things, most of which have been found to be nothing. I am, however, waiting for an echocardiogram. I really miss Mum – she had every medical procedure and test that you can imagine, so she would have been a great font of support and advice. She once said that ‘getting old was not for the faint of heart’ and she wasn’t wrong.
Anyhow, I hope you’ll forgive me for wittering on. I find these falls both alarming and irritating, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I can actually do something about them. Until then, back to the photosynthesis revision – I think I’m at the stage when every fact that goes into my brain displaces another one, but there we go.