Last weekend I spent quite a bit of time playing Pain on the PS3, a game that awards points for the sheer abuse endured by a character you launch via a catapult into fanciful environments, such as the recently released “abusement park” add-on. Coincidentally, I also hurt my neck on the Saturday morning – trying to catch a falling bottle of shampoo in the shower and wrenching my neck in the process.
My neck didn’t hurt much at the time, and I thought I’d sooth it away by spending some quality time on my mum’s massage chair in the conservatory that night, but by the Sunday it was really sore and I was having to fend off the pain with some Anadin I found in the kitchen cupboard.
Then Monday night brought the perfect storm of escalating severity, both in neck pain and some tooth ache that crept up on me. It’s a long time since I’ve been in that kind of agony – the pain following my knee operation was a walk in the park in comparison. I got about two hours of sleep max and ended up taking my first day off on sick leave this year on Tuesday because I was so exhausted.
Fliss remembered that I had some cocodamol tablets left over from said knee operation, so I took one of those on Tuesday afternoon and that kept the dueling pain receptors at bay long enough for me to have a marginally better sleep that night. I was still ruined when I woke for going to work the next morning, but there was stuff to be done and I do kind of pride myself in being pretty resiliant in the face of illness and ailments.
Trouble is I have yet to register with a doctor since I moved back to Scotland. And yes, I’ve been too lazy to find a dentist. So taking a cocktail of different pain killers has been my weapon of choice in fighting the constant stabbing I’m feeling in my jaw. My neck is now much better. Still there, but I bought some of those patch things that heat up and wore one all day yesterday and it seems to have helped a lot.
I’m away for a long weekend, so I knew my chances of getting a dental appointment before then were slim. I’ll just have to tough it out with the Neurofen until I can get it seen to, although it does take me back to mid-1997 when I was going through 8-12 Neurofen a day due to tooth I cracked on a mountain bike landing gone wrong and a dentist who believed in x-raying me for the pay-off, rather than treating the problem.
Finally got that one seen to at the dental hospital in Dundee, sending some poor dental student scurrying for his supervisor after he saw the state my molar was in. But heck, was I going through a lot of Neurofen back then – I had to go to different chemists each day because if you went back to the same one they thought you were stock-piling to top yourself and wouldn’t sell it to you. That’s not the kind of thing you find out unless you’re in a lot of pain… or trying to top yourself.
Anyhow, Fliss has got her and Elisha registered with the dentist we used to go to before we moved to London, so I’ll hopefully get myself set up there again after this weekend is out of the way.
Until then I hope it’s my San Diego Chargers bringing the pain against the New Orleans Saints at Wembley on Sunday. Can’t believe I’m actually going to a Chargers game on home soil. I predict that I’m going to cheer until I’m hoarse and end up totally desperate to see them in San Diego.
Most of all, though, I predict pain!
