It was 1-1 in my best-of-five squash match; a ladder game in the top tier of my local club league. As a 36-year old lover of pizza, this is about about the highest level I’m capable of these days. There’s painful twinge in my back towards the end of the third game, followed by a persistent throb. I brave through the final few points, because I’m a trooper, and took the third game to go 2-1 up.
Any disciplined sportsman knows this is the time to bow out. You never play through an injury. That’s just stupidity. But I’m not a disciplined sportsman. I’m Dan, competitive idiot of the highest degree.
So I played on.
Two more gruelling games later, I snatch the 3-2 victory. Glory is mine. Hurrah. Aren’t I great? The pain would surely go after a few days and it’ll all have been worth it.
That’s generally how my sporting career has evolved in my mid-thirties. Eat pizza, eat pizza, eat pizza, burn three pizzas in a forty-minute squash match, ache, complain, repeat.
This time, unfortunately, the pain doesn’t subside. In fact, the next day, I find myself using my in-law’s walking stick to get around the house.
The referral
More than two months pass. I haven’t played a single game of squash. Some days, my proudest achievement is getting my shoes on. My wife finally convinces me to book a GP appointment. The GP, after hearing apology after apology for wasting NHS time, refers me for an MRI scan.
Referrals in my hospital work like this. You wait around for a week hearing nothing, and then a letter comes through your door saying your appointment is in less than 24 hours, at 07:40 on a Sunday morning and you should confirm your attendance. To confirm, you should call the number provided, which is not staffed on weekends. Also, failure to confirm less than 48 hours before your appointment slot may result in cancellation. I love the NHS.
You also get a handy leaflet and a form to complete.
MRI scanners, as I understand them, use powerful, continuously active magnets. Loose metal objects are discouraged, as they can turn into high-speed projectiles and fly into the scanner, causing severe injury or death. The NHS is quite keen for death not to happen to you or its staff – it leads to a mountain of paperwork – so you must come dressed in clothes with no metal objects. If you do, they’ll strip you down and give you the dreaded gown of bum-hanging-out-age.
Finding clothes without metal is surprisingly difficult. Everything has a metal zip, button, grommet or eyelet these days. I ended up wearing my squash gear. The irony.
The other thing about metal is it occasionally finds its way into a person’s body, apparently. I had to confirm with the radiologist that I had no metal hanging around, waiting to butcher me from the inside. A brief shadow of doubt cast over me as I recalled having dental work done as a teenager. Was that an implant? A crown? Visions swept through my mind of metal finding it’s way from my jaw to the magnet through the path of least resistance which would, no doubt, be my own face. I couldn’t unsee the image of my head exploding like those little aliens in Mars Attacks!
My dentist always said if I didn’t look after my teeth, I’d regret it when I was older. I had no idea this was what she meant.
The MRI scan
Do you know what the problem with hospitals is? The signs. There are signs everywhere. So many signs, in fact, that they all get equally ignored. Have you washed your hands?… Charity cake sale; Tuesday… Everything you need to know about cardiac arrest… Seven things to look for in your poo. There were more signs in the one-minute walk through the outpatients unit than ads on a recipe website.
Hospitals could learn a thing or two from us digital marketers. If you want somebody to pay attention to something, remove all distractions and keep things simple. There is such a thing as information overload.
Getting an MRI scan is a unique experience. You’re laid onto a sterile white bed and conveyor-belted into a smooth white tube that whirs and crackles. I felt like a flabby piece of human sushi being fed to a Decepticon. Fortunately, the moment before you’re inserted as Megatron’s suppository, the radiographer puts a little rubber balloon in your hand to squeeze in case anything goes wrong inside. I know the NHS is low on resources, but getting patients to be in charge of fault detection without training is taking the piss.
You then sit there for about ten minutes – earplugs and earmuffs on – staring at the underside of new your noisy space coffin, waiting for your head to explode.
You know what’s missing from the inside of that machine? Signs. I’d have read anything put in front of me during those ten minutes. I’d have emerged from that MRI scanner with a doctorate in cake sales. Or at least a bachelors in poo-ology.
Finally, the clicking, zapping and humming stops, and you’re slowly motored back out into the world, like a human prize being unveiled on The Generation Game – if it were set on the Starship Enterprise.
As I leave the unit, thwack, I walk straight into the door. There’s another sign I’ve ignored by the handle. Press button on left to exit. Could have shown me that in the bloody coffin, couldn’t you?
I don’t know if my squash career is over or not – we’ll have to wait and see. But I had quite the experience this weekend, and learnt a valuable lesson.
Don’t ever keep playing through a sports injury… or your head might explode.
