cowfish

It’s a difficult time to be a hypochondriac. In the good old days, unless you had a medical text book to hand or training in exotic disease, you made do with the old favourites – measles, rickets, brain tumours, syphilis, malaria, non-specific urethritis and the rest. However, with the introduction of educationals tools like the internet, wikipedia and House MD we can now stretch out into realms heretofore unimagined. Not only can we claim that we have dengue fever, but with a few clicks can now look up the symptoms and be certain that we have them, whereas in the beforetime the walk to the library would have negated any potential reality to the claims, as if you did have The Dengue then you wouldn’t have made it to the front gate, let alone through an encyclopedia as far as De.

However, into the life of every hypochondriac a little rain must fall and one day you might be right about what you’ve got. So, when I found my leg hurt a little bit last week a quick internet search, after some helpful hints shouted out by some cow-orkers (including legionnaires disease and the ever present potentiality that is the brain tumour), led me to sciatica. I thought it sounded vaguely trouser related at first and it is, although very much in the legs and “lower back” (aka bum) areas. I’ve now seen a doctor, been diagnosed and loaded down with a small legion of drugs to take to make me all better. Although if ten days of being high on medication doesn’t fix me the plan seems to be to move on to getting someone to rub me a lot. I can see injury being much more interesting than I imagined.

Anyways, the most important thing about my discomfort, outside of extracting every potential ounce of sympathy out of innocent bystanders even to the extent of purchasing a walking stick (still in the planning stages as I want a cane with a silver skull on top and you can’t rush that kind of lifestyle choice), is to pass on a message of advice to you, the internetsworld. I have a fair idea how I came to be afflicted with my affliction and if I can help but one of you to avoid my own terrible terrible fate (to be high on government subsidised drugs for the next 10 days) then I feel my sacrifice will have been worth it. The  biggest change to my lifestyle in the last few weeks and in my opinion the obvious culprit is the playing of Fallout 3. Extended sessions sitting hunched on my sofa, hands clawing at the XBox controller as I discharge round after round of irradiatied post-apocalyptic ammunition into the limbs of super mutants and human raiders (all bad guys, as my “Paragon of Humanity” live achievement will attest), with minimal movement outside of the occasional picking of my nose have destroyed my lower spine and moved me a step closer to the skull topped cane of my dreams.

So, I say to you now – avoid the temptation of computer games, especially the evil of Fallout 3. They will tear out your spine, show it to you, play tunes Patrick Moore style upon the plinky plonky vertebrae and then stick back it in, slightly wonky. However, I only have three more missions to do in Fallout before I’m done, and it would be silly to let a mere medical issue stand in the way of 60 XBox points…

Other posts

• My leg hurts
• Fallout 3