It's very difficult if people don't know about derby or understand what it is, to make someone realise how awful having it taken from you can be.
My consultant said, "I know you're worried abut your roller-blading" in a somewhat patronising voice. Number one: It's not roller-blading, I don't swan up and down by the duck lake on the occasional saturday in the sunshine, I play a full contact aggressive sport that involves a lot of twists and turns and pivoting movements, which is the exact thing my knee is fucked from doing.
Number two: The longer I am not skating the fatter I get, the more unfit I get, the less relevant I get, the older I get. I'm 40 playing a contact sport in a world where everyday the skaters are getting younger. There is not long for me and I do not have much time. Sitting about wasting three months isn't my idea of recuperation.
But you see, that's the plan. I've got an official diagnosis: I have a partial Anterior Cruciate Ligament tear in my right knee. I was informed about this on Monday when the consultant was imagining Starlight Express or something equally as ridiculous.
Because it's only partial and my knee is strong they want me to do physio for three months and see how it goes before they think about operating. Operating is bad and recovery takes a long time, I get that. But you cannot repair an ACL naturally, the body doesn't supply blood to the area so it remains permanently torn. What you can do is either strengthen all the muscles around the knee, or operate and sew up the tear and graft a piece of new ligament from somewhere else on. Hurray then right? Because option one will work, my knee will get strong and everything will be ok, yes? Well...no.
No, because that usually only works on people who are fairly sedentary in their life and I am not. I play a full contact sport, a full contact sport I practice 4 times a week which involves a lot of being...er not very sedentary at all. I also do cross training for it. So either the consultant (who specialises in sports medicine) is confident that by some miraculous means it will be alright just by physio, or he has underestimated my activity level drastically.
I am reckoning on the drastic underestimation.
Another thing is that I need a knee brace but clearly the NHS being what it is these days and David Cameron basically deciding to personally sign the chit for every cup of doctor's tea, I'm not going to persuade the hospital to give me one, so I shall have to fund it myself. The correct sports knee brace for an ACL tear is a CTi Off-the-shelf and comes in at the tiny little price of £399. Which is just ridiculous, even if it does come in a range of exciting colours.
So now I'm stuck.
Things I can do: I can cycle, and I can swim. I HATE swimming. It makes me want to stab people. Really, actually. I can do weights and kettlebells. Did I mention I hate the gym? And I'm going to have to do all these hideous exercise type things that I hate not even to get better at skating, but just so that I don't get fat and unhealthy, whilst all the time trying to strengthen my knee, and what if non of it works in the end anyway?
What if that?
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