I spoke to friend of mine yesterday on the electric telephone concerning matters of rural machinery. This subject may yet merit a post by itself. He mentioned that he had just checked this blog to look for updates over the last couple of weeks to find there were none. I don't associate with dullards.
Do I make excuses for this? Of course not. I will write as and when I see fit and as well as being very busy on returning from the Northern Hemisphere both at work and at home I have for the first time in my life suffered from an acute back strain.
Have there been things that have stirred the interest? Well sort of. The ACC business. I know what I would do and it is basically make ACC live up to its name and no more. This is the problem. It would appear to have morphed from being an insurance scheme into an arm of the welfare system - as if that hydra needed any more tentacles. A nonagenarian who apparently was the principal author of the scheme in the dim mists of time stuck his head above the parapet and said that when he was doing a spot of chin stroking an arm of the welfare state was what he intended. If this is so (and he didn't appear to have the memory loss people of his age are sometimes afflicted with) he needs a good old fashioned six of the best, trousers down. The changes being proposed are bad in only one regard in that they don't seem to go far enough. An excess to stop trivial claims should be instigated tomorrow. And sod the whining from the victims of society - their time expired a year ago. Screening rights for the Rugby World Cup.? Who gives a rat's arse. It is all going to be on Sky anyway. I can't wait to see an increase in the car crushers traffic - Nissan Skylines are a blot on the landscape. Not much else amuses.
Backache. My attitude to people with acute back ache had been for years that there was nothing going on that couldn't be treated with a couple of harden up pills and a cup of tea. Well, I have to say that this stance has softened a little - but I fully expect it to return when I am completely symptom free which I have pencilled in for tomorrow afternoon. My acute discomfort was bought about not by a sudden catastrophic episode but by an afternoon of tree felling and lifting of resulting lumber into a trailer. After this not world shattering exertion the evening found me a little uncomfortable. I came to leap out of bed full of the joys of spring (sic) the following morning and I couldn't. Never known anything like it. I could not sit up in bed. Really very unpleasant pain In the corset region precluded bending at the waist at all. I rolled onto the floor and struggled to an upright posture with the aid of the nightstand and things got a bit better.
I soon found that any activity that could be accomplished lying flat or standing upright was easy. But anything that involved even five degrees of flexion at the waist was impossible. The pain from para vertebral spasm is bloody awful. I struggle through work taking harden up pills (they don't work) and COX2 inhibitors (about as much use as a chocolate teapot). I get Mrs O to apply Votaren Emugel as advertised in those dreadful infomercials that screen between Andrew Saville and Jim Hickey. This muck is also as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. I struggle through a day off just lying in bed feeling useless - which I was - but had to return for a day's toil in the fields the next day. Here things started getting a whole better when one of my minders suggested I get serious with the analgesia. I knew she was right. My views on painkillers are that if the proffered pill didn't start its life as a poppy I'm not interested. So a few days on a chemically unrelated but equally efficacious mate to morphine saw me turn the corner.
You know things are getting a whole lot better when you don't wish for velcro on your shoes and are reaching for the tramadol for its buzz as opposed to its analgesia. We are over all this now and golf looms for the weekend - as long as it doesn't rain.
So as I am feeling better and the agony of this time last week fades into the mists of time I have only one thing to say to anyone who comes up to me and says 'I can't do that 'cos me back hurts'.
Harden the f*** up.
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