me, my hip and i

Difficult, always difficult to know what to put in the first post in your new blog. Do you launch straight into the meaty stuff and hope that people will get the gist? Or do you hold back for a bit until you know people are reading, and save them the hastle of rooting through your archives? Is it presumptious to even assume for a minute that anybody would bother reading at all?

 Whichever: if you’re here because you’re backtracking and want to start at the beginning, then Hello – this is as far back as it goes. If you’re here because you’re here now, and you’re waiting for the exciting stuff, then hold tight – I’ll be writing as often as I have the time and the inclination. If you’re here because you’re a complete stranger and you happened on me and my hip and my blog by accident then Hello to you too; it’s always good to meet new people.

For the record, I’m at work as I write tonight. I work on an adult mental health ward in a smallish seaside town in Wales. I was in horrendous pain this morning but I made the executive decision to double-dose on my Diclofenac because that’s the only way I get any actual pain relief, and that only lasts about three hours. One tablet’s meant to last for eight. It’s a bit crap, to say the least. I was trying to explain to my son earlier how it feels, and the best I could come up with was, it’s like when someone gives you a dead arm, you know, when they punch you really hard right in that little dent just below the shoulder? Well it’s like that, two seconds after the school bully’s thumped you, only in my hip. If you look at my thigh (of which I’ll probably spare you the treat), you can see where it is because there’s a reddish ring that marks the spot, with a sprig of purple veins as a garnish. The whole thing has my original surgery scar running diagonally through it. And yeah, it hurts, lots.