You Snapped What? Ooh That Must Have Hurt

Those of you who know me have probably heard about my achilles tendon injury, for those of you who don't, I 'm going to tell you anyway.

Allow me to elucidate, it happened playing football in August last year I'd just sent a pass upfield then went to run up the pitch and bang, it happened. I thought someone had kicked me in the back of the ankle, ouch, but when I turned around to punch whoever did it there was nobody near me, my leg just gave way, I couldn't bear any weight on it. The other players were wondering why I was on my knees.
I knew what I'd done, I'd seen it happen to someone before, the pain was indescribable, I can only liken it to having a shopping trolley crashed into the back of your ankle. I started to crawl off the pitch being watched by my team mates who thought I was being a drama queen, one of them Dave, helped me off and then the duty PTI came over with an icepack and the accident book, very efficient I thought. To keep my spirits up he kept telling me I hadn't snapped my achilles tendon but probably torn a muscle, but I had self diagnosed the injury, I knew it had gone.

A quick phone call to my girlfriend and within thirty minutes I was in QA with an orthopaedic surgeon pulling at my foot asking, "does this hurt?"... "only a lot" says I.... "what about if I do this?" says the doctor... "arggggggggggh" I replied..... "yes it looks as though you have ruptured your achilles tendon" I could have told him that. So began ten days in a plastercast right up to the top of my thigh, it weighed a ton but it kept my foot pointing straight down which relaxed the tendon and stopped any further damage. Ten days of getting to grips with crutches, one legged shaving, washing, tea-making and pulling the curtains down were highlights. There are two ways of treating achilles tendon rupture, one is conservative the other is surgery where the tendon is stitched together, I was told I would be treated conservatively.

This cast was removed when the bruising and swelling had subsided then I had a scan which showed the damage was up near the calf muscle which thankfully for a scaredee cat like me meant they couldn't go down the surgery route. I was put in a "pot" a cast from below the knee to the toes with my foot in the equinus or ballerina position for a fortnight to allow the tendon to knit back together. Two weeks later another cast with my foot being moved to halfway and another cast two weeks after that, I chose purple for the first two casts which isn't as much of a talking point as this latest pink one.

So now I'm in the neutral position and it was quite sore after they bent my foot up and the pot went on but it calmed down after a couple of days. The worst of it is having to use crutches to get around, I can't put any weight on the injured leg and I would recommend not leaving a bank statement in a plastic wallet on your living room floor, see through plastic wallets and crutches don't get on, luckily for me the tv set was in the way to stop me flying or I'd have been back up to A&E. I've learned a few useful tips such as wearing cargo shorts means you can carry stuff around from the kitchen to the living room, flasks of tea and bottles of wine especially.

So thats where I am, I've been off work for six weeks so far and probably another six to come, thank god the Olympics was on for the first two weeks and for sports and documentary channels keeping me occupied, I've also been learning guitar but it's slow progress. I wasn't going to let it get me down, even though I'm very active, walking, cycling and rugby are a big part of my life but I accepted what has happened to me in the first week, I told myself I've just got to get on with it and get better, my girlfriend has been fantastic and my friends have all rallied round, work have also been brilliant, they haven't pressured me to come back even if I was able to.

Guidance about my recovery was vague, I had to do a lot of fact finding for myself, there was no information from the hospital or my doctor. I have a good friend Ian who is a climber and outdoor activity organiser for Sheffield Council he had the same injury last year, he was able to give me loads of advice and put me on to a website forum http://www.marfell.me.uk/ where other ATR sufferers can share their stories and advice. This has been invaluable for me and I'd thoroughly recommend anyone who has this injury to trawl through the site and glean the information from it.

There have been disappointments, I missed out on the company sportsday in York something I'd been part of in the planning stages and I had to cancel a hill walking week in the Lake District so that will be a definate trip I'll rearrange as soon as I'm ready. It will be a long road to full recovery, months of physiotherapy will follow, I'm back to hospital on the third of October when they tell me I'm getting an Aircast Boot, it looks like a leg from a Star Wars stormtrooper and hopefully will mean I can bear some weight on my leg and learn to walk again.

Slow but sure will be my mantra.

Value For Money

The Help For Heroes rugby game from Twickenham on Saturday was fine entertainment, a host of former England and Wales internationals were on parade, Lawrence Dallaglio, Colin Charvis, Scott Gibbs, Will Greenwood and Martin Johnson to name a few.

A match to raise money for soldiers injured in Afghanistan and Iraq was never going to be taken lightly, add to that a crowd of more than 50,000 and the scene was set for a cracking game. The rugby was quality and so was the pre-match and half-time entertainment.
At the interval electric string quartet Escala kept the crowd spellbound. Escala are the four young ladies you may have seen on Britains Got Talent or more lately the Sky Sports Premier League football trailer. Their instruments may look like something from a Science Fiction movie but are in fact two electric violins, a cello and a viola.

It got me thinking as to when I last saw any half time entertainment at a football match, in fact I can't recall there even being any at the FA Cup Final in May but I was so nervous I wasn't really paying attention to the pitch at half time. In the past I can remember the occasional parachute display, brass bands, drum majorettes twirling and dropping batons and kids in penalty shoot-outs. I presume those two spoilsports Heath and Safety have a lot to do with it. Burnley recently had a parachutist who got caught in the roof of the stand and one parachutist actually hit the roof of the stand at Villa Park nine years ago and was severely injured so I can see why that particular avenue of entertainment may have been curtailed. Nigel Rogoff was one of several RAF skydiving Santas descending into Villa Park in blustery conditions. Aston Villa fan Robert McEvoy continues the tale: "This gentleman hit the stand, and was promptly dragged off by his parachute, landing on the track in front of the Main Stand. To say the ground went quiet was an understatement, the worst bit, apart from watching a man fall approximately the height of two houses, was that there were six other parachutists behind him, and the man on the PA system was shouting for them to land elsewhere. As Villa Park is surrounded by terraced houses and the M6, they had little choice but to land on the pitch. Parachutist Number two had seen his mate hit the stand, and in trying to avoid that he missed the opposite stand by inches, as everyone in the stadium held their breath. The other five landed in goals, on corner flags and anywhere but the cross in the middle of the pitch."
Rogoff lost his leg in the accident but has since made a good recovery and even married the nurse who cared for him in the months after.

I remember a very amusing incident three seasons ago at Dean Court when covering an AFC Bournemouth match. The Royal Marines from Poole were giving an exhibition of unarmed combat, six mats were put out in the corners and on the halfway lines then six teams of four Bootnecks took it in turn to knock hell out of each other. An interested onlooker was Bournemouths mascot Cherry Bear, who was looking somewhat closely at the action, after a while he went up behind a Marine and swung a huge furry legged kick at the marines' backside, down he went and then all the Royal Marines went for the man in the oversize ursine head. Cherry Bear dispatched the rest of the Marines with consumate ease using a selection of throws, kicks, punches and a swipe with a baseball bat that left his assailant gasping for breath. The pitch was littered with fallen Bootnecks and the stands were full of people falling about with laughter.

West Brom had a race on Sunday between some of the west midlands teams mascots, the five participants had to run one width of The Hawthorns' pitch. Ladbrokes had been taking charity bets in the run-up to the race and raised £2,204, all of which will go to the BBC West Midlands Kidney Kids Appeal, Wolfie the Wolf saw off the challenge of Villa's Hercules the Lion, Albion's Baggie Bird, Walsall's Swifty and the BBC WM Wonder Moose, who finished second through to fifth, respectively.
That was good value for the paying customer but these days all we get is a kickabout by some of the fringe players or the reserve goalkeeper having a bit of practice. Not what you'd call "worth the admission fee" which being £38 at Fratton Park you'd feel a bit mugged by not getting anything other than deafening music and incoherent announcements. The officialdom gets in the way of entertainment too, referees are very quick to punish players who "over-celebrate" scoring a goal, surely this is what the punter expects to see, a goal a celebration it's what they pay for?

Come on football clubs give us a brass band at half-time, a shoot out, a hit the crossbar challenge or maybe even a Police Dog Display team, they were always good value. The cost of a weeks shopping is what it takes to go and see a football match these days and that to me is not giving value for money for ninety minutes football (plus added on time) and no unarmed mascot combat.

The Truth Is Out There

The Large Hadron Collider was switched on last week amid lots of ill informed speculation and scaremongering from those claiming that the end of the world is nigh, the use of the web to spread fears that flicking the switch on the LHC could create a Black Hole that could swallow up the Earth was of concern to inventor of the internet Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Okay so the switch-on did happen to coincide with earthquakes in Iran and China but thats all it was, coincidence, in fact both stories were hardly reported. I found out about the Iranian quake by text message as it was happening from a friend in Dubai who had to leave her office block when it started to shake, the tremor was felt right across the Gulf States.

The Worldwide Web is the catalyst for wrong information, when Sir Tim invented the web I bet he hadn't reckoned on Wikipaedia for instance. A great idea in concept, someone posts a definition or an article about a subject or a famous person and anyone, yes anyone else can go into that article and add to it or embellish the definition. Many entries have found to be false, thus making the whole thing a website of misinformation, I have been told by a senior lecturer that some university students have actually copied and pasted wikipaedia extracts into their coursework. Thats not to say Wikipaedia is all bad, the majority of information in there is valid but some is wide of the mark.

There are also plenty of conspiracy theory websites out there, full of circumstantial, anecdotal and photographic evidence but how can we the web users separate the truth from fantasy? As the web evolves the user needs reassurance that what they are reading is factually accurate. When making a purchase online the safety certificate and the "padlock" logo both give you the signs that it is safe to use that site similarly a certificate or logo from the Worldwide Web Consortium could give a credibililty grading to a site, stars out of ten perhaps? The BBC getting nine and the Daily Mail with three, you get the picture? I found a story where John Terry was the FA spokesperson for a Respect Referees Campaign, surely some mistake?

Many millions of people use the web for information every day and the not so well developed countries are in the early stages of using the web, for an African schoolchild logging on and finding a site that claims the HIV/AIDS virus is manmade by the CIA could be potentially harmful to a developing society.
The most popular conspiracy theories at present are The US Government planned the 11th September attacks, Princess Diana was murdered by the British Royal Family, The Apollo Moon Landings (my favourite this one, as I don't believe the Americans actually landed on the Moon). Global Warming or Climate Change was invented by scientists when the Cold War ended so they wouldn't lose their funding, and most unbelievable of all Arcadi Gaydamak, the Jerusalem based Russian-Israeli businessman, has said for the first time that he, rather than his son Sacha is the owner of Portsmouth Football Club. He claims that the club are up for sale for £300m and that the new stadium will be built in conjunction with the Dubai Royal Family (£300m! a tad overpriced?)

So we'll wait and see where the Hadron Collider takes us, it may be that the Cern scientists will discover free renewable energy from their LHC experiments and pass the benefits onto mankind, now then that's a conspiracy theory that I'd like to start.