Infirmity and ageing

Like flies, we're going down

Let's cast an eye around the doctors' surgery waiting room, in the idiot village of Wesloggit and Batsmans Bottom:

Oh, look, there's an interesting case:

Face the patient straight on. Just below the neck, to the left, all is square, proper, and looks as it should. To the right, the clavicle slopes away alarmingly. See, there, how the hand trembles in pain. Notice the loss of strength and movement, almost to the point of paralysis.

A typical case of Ottley's shoulder, which, untreated, can lead to a chronic need to retire hurt during an innings.

Who's that just booking in with the receptionist? Why it's Mr Naughty:

This will be a long consultation. Not because there's anything unusual going on with his knees, other than years and years of the fair wear and tear a lifetime playing sport will impose, but because it takes so long to unwrap each, loving encased in braces, supports and bandages, until the sufferer develops a stiff-legged gait, leading to the description: Robocop disease.

Just coming out of the nurses' room? There's AD:

NURSE: We've not seen you for a long time.

AD: No. I've not been well, you see.

His hands were fine, until he held onto a catch, when the webbing between his fingers split. Not used to it, you see. A painful and debilitating injury that can take an age to heal, unless it's to his wallet-hand, which sees little action in the normal course of everyday life.

We exit the surgery, and there's Mr B O'S:

He carries a note in his hand. It authorises the hospital to scan his knee, to see what, exactly, is going on in there. They want to nip things in the bud. Not for any medical reasons, but because with Mr Naughty and all, there's a local shortage of knee supports, knee braces, and bandages.

As Mr B O'S makes his way to the car park, he passes the pharmacy:

Nobby, G, and Istvan emerge, each carrying a large carrier bag of painkillers. The owner of the chemists, behind the glass door, sighs, shakes her head, and flips the sign over to read “closed – out of stock”.

There's to be no more home games without a team from St John ambulance either (preferably) in attendance, or (at least) on standby.

The cliché says that as you get older things take longer to heal, which is probably true, but there's complications. Mental, physical and medical complications. With age comes the ability to get injured in ever more ways. The bizarre. The entirely unforeseeable. The obscure, and, increasingly and annoyingly, the straightforward: “I was okay yesterday, and this morning everything's all rubbish”. The frightening thing is that, apparently, were it not for taking regular exercise, the burden imposed on the NHS would somehow be increased.