We will not be thwarted

We haven’t set a date for our journey but Doris suggested that next May might a good time of year – not too hot and not too cold. It is about 600 miles, so if we stay fit and average of 20 miles each day, it will take us about 30 days. Unfortunately, staying fit currently seems like a bigger challenge than we might have thought, with problems coming in areas we did not expect.

Since the late Summer Bank Holiday, I have felt generally tired and have had occasional spells of light-headedness. I will not bore you with the description but suffice to say that one or two were sustained and, to me, vary scary. The doctor took some blood tests but could find nothing wrong. His sage advice was that “it will pass”.

Unfortunately, yesterday afternoon, on the same day I got my blood test results, I had another brief spell of light-headedness. That made me doubt the morning’s hope that I am recovering and lead me to ponder whether there is something, less obvious, at play. I am trying to put that to the back of my mind, however, because, in my book, less obvious equals scarier.

Doris has been suffering in a different way. After a few days of discomfort, a pain in her shoulder became agony. Doris is very stoical when it comes to illness and pain, so to hear her frequently crying out in pain meant that it had to be very bad. A visit to a physiotherapist didn’t help and with no imminently available GP appointment, she succumbed to my urging and went to “Accident and Emergency” at the local hospital.

They diagnosed frozen shoulder, a debilitating condition that can, apparently take as much as thirty months to pass! (http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/articles/article.aspx?articleId=168)

Typically, Doris is refusing to be beaten and exploring ways of dealing with it. Also, I guess, we are both hoping that the initial diagnosis, in a hectic A&E department, turns out to be wrong and it is something less severe. If not, there is a specialist clinic in London that has pioneered a treatment that, while it doesn’t promise to work miracles, does claim that their treatment works within weeks rather than months.

So hopefully we will both be fit enough to do our journey, come May, and I can get on with worrying about more mundane matters such as why my Achilles tendons feel so sore every morning and how they will fair on a 600 mile walk.