Hi There!!

Hi. I’m glad you’ve taken the time to read this. I’m writing it cos I think there might be a few people who’ll want to ask me questions about… things… and here is where the answers will be. Sorry to be cryptic but you probably know what I’m talking about already.

Well. Life is surprising isn’t it? Someone once said to me that he really only wanted surprises at christmas and birthdays. At other times it’s usually not a pleasant experience.

I’m not sure if I ever agreed with that point of view but I did get a bit of a surprise early last week.

Let me start at the beginning. As some of you may know I visited England for a short time over christmas last year. (That wasn’t a surprise). One particularly cold day while I was there I began feeling an aching pain in my left knee. Being the manly person that I am (stop laughing), I shook it off and disregarded it as my body complaining after I had promised not to return to England at that time of year ever again.

No further event occurred before I returned to NZ and the family and I had a pleasant, but quick, holiday.

The footy season was just ending when I returned and I play for a team of mature guys. No, I’m neither the oldest, nor the worst. Suffice it to say, we finished at the bottom of the table this year. But I digress. My knee had not really improved and I realised that running was proving really difficult. So much so, in fact, that I couldn’t play after 5 minutes on the pitch.

Yes, some of my team mates may say that’s no different from any other time I’ve played but this time I couldn’t go back on. I was in real pain.

So I went to the doctor.

He said it was …. gout.

I was not impressed. As far as I was concerned, gout was a form of arthiritis. I’d only just turned 41 years old. Old age was taking hold of me rather early, I thought.

What was really painful (even more so than the pain in my knee) was the fact that gout is diet related. So I was told to stop eating red meat, sea food and beer!!!

:-0

I guess that still left KFC.

Anyway, After a few weeks of this attempted diet, and several courses of painkillers, I finally had some x-rays done. Unfortunately, this revealed a ‘growth’ in my knee joint area. By growth, I mean ‘tumor’.

Now don’t be too concerned, I’m ok. I’m not talking about anything ‘terminal’. I’m just going through the motions at the moment to determine if the growth is malignant or not. I’ll enter some details about that experience later. Suffice it to say, I’m in good hands and the NZ health system is treating me well.

I think that’s all I’ll say for now. I promise I’ll fill in the rest of the details as the days go by.