Last weekend I spent quite a bit of time playing Pain on the PS3, a game that awards points for the sheer abuse endured by a character you launch via a catapult into fanciful environments, such as the recently released “abusement park” add-on. Coincidentally, I also hurt my neck on the Saturday morning – trying to catch a falling bottle of shampoo in the shower and wrenching my neck in the process.
My neck didn’t hurt much at the time, and I thought I’d sooth it away by spending some quality time on my mum’s massage chair in the conservatory that night, but by the Sunday it was really sore and I was having to fend off the pain with some Anadin I found in the kitchen cupboard.
Then Monday night brought the perfect storm of escalating severity, both in neck pain and some tooth ache that crept up on me. It’s a long time since I’ve been in that kind of agony – the pain following my knee operation was a walk in the park in comparison. I got about two hours of sleep max and ended up taking my first day off on sick leave this year on Tuesday because I was so exhausted.