I have arthritis…

If you know me, you’d prob­a­bly have added me on Face­book and likely would have seen the x-ray scans of my leg/foot/ankle. Ever since I came to Tai­wan, I have exer­cised a lot and I mean a lot. I was on a strict diet and my goal was to lose 16kg. I achieved that goal in 3 months of plan­ning it. I exer­cised every­day for an hour, doing car­dio­vas­cu­lar exer­cises to lose the weight that I had gained from eat­ing too much in Eng­land. I lost the weight I wanted to lose and to be hon­est I looked good so I was sat­is­fied with what I had achieved. I fell in-love with this Korean chick and I stopped exer­cis­ing, as I felt so happy for the first time in my life. I felt free, loved and wanted by someone.

How­ever, the story changed when she went back to Korea to fin­ish her stud­ies in Seoul, South Korea. I felt down and depressed when she left, so I started exer­cis­ing again to keep my mind off of how bad it was not being with my lovely jagi.

I exer­cised a lot, sim­i­lar to how I was exer­cis­ing before, except I was prob­a­bly less inten­sive when it came to car­dio­vas­cu­lar exer­cises, I did a lot more press-ups, went boat­ing, swim­ming and all of that. Just two days ago, I felt sig­nif­i­cant enough pain in my foot to be con­cerned about the wel­fare of my foot as I had dam­aged that area before; I frac­tured my leg pre­vi­ously. This was just two nights ago.

2 days ago, I went to a hos­pi­tal to have my foot looked at after work, I had to miss an hour of work, but my health is more impor­tant so I decided to go and get it checked out.

As I was walk­ing into the hos­pi­tal as my mother had dropped me off by car, and I was feel­ing the same pains in my foot just walk­ing nor­mally. I felt there must have been some­thing wrong, I could feel it and sense it.

So the doc­tor looked at my foot and he qui­etly dis­missed any idea of get­ting an x-ray done. He stated all I had was a com­mon among ath­letes called  Achilles ten­don; how­ever I didn’t believe this to be the case. I insisted on an x-ray say­ing to him that I had not seen a doc­tor in while about my bro­ken leg. He refused twice say­ing he could assure me that all I had was Achilles ten­don. — But, I think he just wanted to go home after a long day at work. I saw him at nearly clos­ing time, even though I missed one hour of work.

I got the x-ray done in the end and this dear doc­tor informed me that I had early stages of arthri­tis. I was shocked, speech­less and hor­ri­fied. I wanted to ask, what the next step was, how­ever as I could not speak, my mother said what I would have said for me. I felt hor­rid, dis­mayed and extremely unhappy. The doc­tor said there is noth­ing that he could do. He rec­om­mended me to fly back to Eng­land or to go to Switzer­land as appar­ently they have a fair few more expe­ri­enced doc­tors who spe­cial­ize on this par­tic­u­lar issue of mine. He said some­thing about bone cor­rec­tive surgery.

I can’t walk with­out feel­ing pain, I def­i­nitely can’t run and I kind of feel crip­pled. I have to drag my leg along as it is too painful to step on the ground nor­mally. I really wish I could recover nat­u­rally, but that will never hap­pen. I’ll prob­a­bly fly back to Eng­land, how­ever that would likely mean not see­ing my girl­friend for a long time among other ‘issues’ which will occur. I have a few dilem­mas which I have to solve. But fuck me, this wasn’t any­thing I’d have expected to have happened.

You can see more of my x-ray pic­tures at my new pho­tog­ra­phy site:

 http://photography.jargoned.com/2012/05/x-rays-i-may-have-arthritis/