Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4
“I am going to need you to guide me in here,” Bruce said.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I can’t let you do that medical procedure here.”
“Look,” replied Bruce, “we’re all doctors, we’ll take responsibility for what we do.”
“I’m a doctor, but I can’t let you do that here.”
We walked into a normal treatment room and Bruce basically did it blind. Using the thinnest of needles, he went through the muscle, barely touched the coating around the bone — but enough for me to flinch. That told him he had gone a fraction too far. Then a blood-stained fluid came seeping back into the syringe. He had found the right spot and he injected diluted cortisone to get rid of the dried blood.
Bruce told me I would have to rest for two days and continue with the high dose of anti-inflammatories, especially when I tried running again. I was bothered by the level of anti-inflammatories, but both doctors reassured me they were necessary.
On Wednesday morning, I ran for 40 minutes with Gerard watching, iced the leg and then we treated it. The fear that the crepitus would return and my Olympics would be over was huge. When Gerard checked the leg I was almost shaking with fear.
“It’s not there,” he said, moving it. “It’s not there.”
I burst into tears, overwhelmed by relief.
“Can we just try it again?” “OK.”
“No, it’s not there. It’s definitely gone.”
That evening I ran with Gary around the village, so relieved that the crepitus had gone that I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that I needed to use the toilet three times. “It’s just the anti-inflammatories,” I said to Gary. It didn’t occur to me that this would have serious repercussions. I was eating food normally, yet it was passing straight through me. Nothing was being absorbed.
The stress levels decreased a little, but I still had the feeling we weren’t out of the woods. On Thursday I wanted to try out the racing shoes I would use in Sunday’s race. “Don’t do it,” Gary and Gerard said. “You don’t need to do it.”
“But you don’t wear new shoes in a race without first trying them out,” I said. I had the feeling they knew something that I didn’t. Why else would they want me in cushioned trainers all the time? Something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. After an ice-bath, I became momentarily dizzy when walking back to the apartment. Was I hypoglycaemic? Was it the anti-inflammatories? I asked Bruce if it was possible for me to come off the course. Worried about my leg, he wanted me to stay on them.
The leg was almost fine now; certainly it would hold out to do what I needed it to do. The problem, as I was about to learn, lay elsewhere.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4
|
