So I had a doctors appointment two weeks ago and I’d like to tell you about it in my own inimitable way.

For some time now I’ve been having excruciating pains in my left arm. Pain that I can only adequately describe as toothache of the muscles. Imagine the worst dental pain you’ve ever experienced and now transfer the thought of that pain into your arm. Yeah, that’s how it’s been.

Foolishly, being a perfect fool of course, I ignored it.

I figured that maybe it was just a trapped nerve somewhere and that it would come loose eventually through steady and continued use of painkillers and my TENS machine.

Berk extraordinaire!!!

The pain always begins in my left shoulder and then radiates down the tricep muscle before taking a detour into my lower forearm and finally landing in my thumb and forefinger. And when it strikes (several times a day) the result is always the same. Blistering agony, pins and needles from hades and the feeling as if I want the damn thing amputated.

My lovely wife insisted that I go to the doctor and get it checked out once and for all. I imagined still that it was nought more than a trapped nerve and that maybe by some kind of massage or manipulation I would be set free from said pain.

Au contraire mon ami.

After a pretty extensive examination the doctor pronounced his diagnosis. I have cervical spondylosis.

I asked him to repeat that as I don’t have a cervix and I thought that surely it must be something only a woman could suffer from. I was always useless at biology. He repeated it and I was still none the wiser even when he explained what the cervical was.

This left only one option open to me…

“Could you write that down pleased doctor?” I asked.

He did and I sat and stared at the piece of headed surgery paper that he had handed me. There it was in black and white, and also in rather neat handwriting for a doctor – Cervical Spondylosis.

No, I hadn’t heard of it before either but that’s what I have. It’s a fairly common condition brought on by aging, so it seems, although I can’t help think that all those years of headbanging to heavy metal in my formative years couldn’t have helped much either. Well it can’t have done could it?

Anyway, it is this condition, oddly enough, that is causing the arm pain and I have had my dosage of amitriptyline (I think that’s how you spell it) increased by 100%. This means of course, as I take it at night, that I’m neither use nor ornament in the mornings and getting out of bed seems like a chore

Yesterday I began my first course of physiotherapy where I was given a couple of exercises to do and I left the surgery in far more pain than when I’d entered it, which seems a bit counter-productive when you think about it. No pain, no gain I guess.

So that’s where I am right now. There are far worse things in life than cervical spondylosis so I’m not going to wail and moan about it, especially as my younger self’s penchant for throwing my head about to Judas Priest is probably a contributary factor, but instead I’m just going to live with it.

Well what else can you do?