Back in the Jug Agane

 Doing physio again. Back in the Arches Physiotherapy Centre, where I did the pilates classes detailed in my book Spine. I doubt there's a book in this one, though. Spine covered my leg, ankle and knee trauma, as well as all the back stuff. It's all linked, so this feels like an inevitable sequel I'm disobliged to write. 

The place hasn't changed. I mean, it literally hasn't changed in any part in the last three years. I can't swear the people sitting in the waiting room were not here the last time too. The same blue, moulded chairs. The gnomic, shut off, "fitness area". The same two paintings, fag-ash deep in dust: the lollipop-shaped, "Tree of Life", and, "Swimmers", a slanted view of bathers in sensible one-piece costumes seen through bevelled ripples of water. There's the same odd glass screen with "fusion" written on it, which tells the wrong time and seems to have no proper function. 

What has changed is that I'm sweating. It's still March, but this is the hottest, driest day of the year so far. The single hot, dry day of the year so far, in fact. My previous appointments were in the blackest winter, a pall of gloom spreading over my core-strengthening diversions. 

My physio is called Anna Glasgow, a name both comforting and scary. Be gentle with me, Anna, I'm older and more brittle than I was then. These days I'm like petrified kindling. The fucking crackle of me as I sweep past, like I've got bird's nest shoes. 

They've put physio and podiatry on the SECOND floor. Above dentistry and the Citizen's Advice Bureau. Maybe that's the first test. "You made it up the stairs? Go home, you time-waster. No therapy for you!"

Anna arrives and beckons me to the physio room. She's young, but everyone is now. Rude, I call it. She has tattoos on her fingers and ear, and is immune to my chat, but everyone is now. She physically pauses and recalibrates when I tell her the ankle pain that set up my referral a year ago, and prompted the X-rays she's been looking at, are of no interest to me. I was in agony for a week without explanation and then...it just went away. I'm a middle-aged man, and that means I'm a fucking idiot. I wouldn't go to the doctor unless I was in absolute fucking agony. I have a lot of bits of metal in my foot, put there by medical professionals - its not some Tetsuo the Iron Man kink - and I thought a bit of scrap might have become dislodged. It felt like spikes scraping the bone and I couldn't put weight on it. But, by the time the X-rays were back with the doctor, two months later - she found them "satisfactory" - my foot had been fine for about seven weeks. But my knee is never fine. My knee is an ongoing concern. My knee feels like it could buckle beneath me at any moment and, while I had the ear of a physiotherapist, I was going to press for some investigation of my rusted lower half. 

I explain the history of my ruined nethers, and she types it all up, occasionally asking me pointed questions, and looking dubious at the vagueness of my answers. "Sometimes, when I'm out walking, and I look suddenly to the left, the tendons in the back of my knee tighten, and there'll be a hot second of pain." "Right." "It sounds stupid, doesn't it?" "*silence*". She types for about half an hour. She has great posture. Or maybe she's just rigid with fury. 

She asks me about allergies. About any diseases I might have. Any medications I'm on. I usually enjoy answering these questions, because it's like a box-ticking exercise for my surprising good health. But I'm a man who can get out of bed in the morning and discover my foot is a ball of furious agonies for an entire week, with no obvious cause, and which then it cures itself. Who knows what's going on with my body? I only have a clear bill of health because I haven't been to the doctor. The only thing I know is fine is my brain - I had my head examined about four years ago - and my eyes are apparently extremely healthy, even though they barely work in a conventional sense. But the healthy brain was a long time ago. Four years is enough time for anything to wither and shrivel. During the course of the chat I forget the name of the hospital that tried to chop my leg off. That doesn't sound good, brainwise. You'd think I'd remember something like that. 

It was Kings College Hospital. Kings College Hospital. Sure, I remember now. 

Bastards. 

She makes me walk up and down the floor in my socks. It's a hot day, so I leave mortifying footprints on the vinyl flooring. She's requested I roll up my tracksuit bottoms up to the knee, so I look like a sporty regency buck. I have a scar running from the top of my knee to halfway down my shin and my leg bows like a bay window. These are my credentials. She starts to take me very seriously indeed. I'm a project now. She gets me on the sofa and asks me very politely, as I believe they have to nowadays, if she can hurt me in the places where she wants to hurt me. I'm a good patient. Once I'm in the care of a medical professional they can do what they like to me. That's probably why they fancied hacking my leg off that time. "Can we cut your leg off, Mr Higgins?" "I'm sure you know best, doctor. Saw away. Gets me out of the washing up, after all ha ha ha." "Good lad!"

The hell is wrong with me? 

Anna goes about her discreet medical violence, noting that my body is a dense knot of tension, as stiff and wary as an angry dog. I cannot separate my hips from any movement of my legs, they rise and fall with every stretch or flex. I am born to dance. She wants to see how far I can fold my leg back and there it is - the pain. The specific pain. I've been telling her about its unreliability, giving her the circumstances of when its likely to occur but, just as often, it doesn't show up at all, like a friend who texts you, "Just leaving", when you're already in the bar where you agreed to meet, at the time you agreed to meet. But she finds it. She digs it out. Twice, the second time is worse. "Is that it?" she says, digging her rubber-clad fingers into the hollow behind my knee, pulling on the tendon like Mark King rocking a solo, no Gaffa tape on her thumbs. She's found it. She looks pleased for the first time. Though that might be because she's hurt me. 

She types up her notes, as I tug my track suit down from around my knees. She gives me some exercises on a photocopied sheet, and hands me a length of rubber the exact colour of a Starburst grab-bag, so every time I see it, out of the corner of my eye, my heart races for a moment. But no, I have no Starburst, I have painful resistance training instead. 

As always, leaving the Arches Health and Wellbeing Centre is a pleasure. And it's a beautiful day. And the pain, which wasn't there before the therapy, isn't too bad if I don't focus on it. Besides I'm in pain everyday anyway, it's the background noise of my life. So I limp home, clutching my exercises. Another appointment next month. I'll be fixed by then.