I’ve been pretty busy since I last wrote for this blog. I suppose I’d better fill you in on my latest endeavours in Hamburg. After almost four years of niggles and pains from the repairs to my broken legs [run over by a lorry in a near career-ending collision – ed.] I decided it was time to get all of the metal out of my body and try to put myself straight. After a few phone calls back to the UK and to the hospital where I initially had my surgery, it was evident that if I didn’t want to wait around for four months to get the tinware out I would have to look elsewhere than the UK.
Lucky for me, my team doctor, whom I have worked with all year, just so happens to be an orthopaedic surgeon and does this stuff every day. So, soon enough I was on the slab in Hamburg getting the stuff hammered out of me.
After a day spent a day doing tests, X-Rays etc., the next morning I was ready to go “under the knife”. Equipped with my sexy paper underwear and my gown, I was wheeled downstairs to the theatre and before I knew it I was waking up back where I started, all titanium-free. The operation was pretty simple; cut me open at my knee and hip, undo and take out a few screws and then loosen the big nail off and pull it out of my femur. Apparently this part didn’t want to come out so easily and the surgeon had to get his hammer out. That explained a lot when I started to wake up.
Two days of laying around with a few more checks, visits from physios and a little more laying around and I’m in the airport on the way home. Pretty amazing stuff really, considering what Ive just had done. I’ll have to use crutches for a few days or until the pain goes down and I can walk without a limp and then I can start thinking about getting into the gym and back out on the bike.
I’m hoping, now this is done, it should solve a few problems and give me a little helping hand in getting back to feeling “normal” again. Of course, it’s not all “cut and shut” and I know I have months more physio and exercises ahead of me but sport is all about striving for perfection and always wanting and trying to be better and better, I suppose.
Onwards and upwards !
Matt
