After arriving home from my Spanish tour the first thing I did after unpacking was to go and get my ribs checked out at the local hospital. After having an x-ray the doctor told me that I hadn’t punctured a lung, which I never thought I had in the first place and that their just bruised! Not too sure how he could tell as when I went for the x-ray the radiologist couldn’t even read the doctors writing and had to ask me what I was there for and even after I had told him he x-rayed the front of my chest rather than the side! But hey ho I’m sure they knew what they were doing! It’s now four weeks since I fell over and hurt my ribs and they still hurt on the odd occasion if I twist too much or take a deep breath but their definitely getting better.
Julie was on holiday the week after I got back (she always seems to be on holiday when I come back from a tour but then that’s usually the reason why I come back) so we decided to head west for a few days and ended up camping at Wareham in Dorset along the river.
We only stayed there for three nights as there was a cold north easterly wind blowing off Poole harbour and straight across the campsite and no matter where we pitched the tent there was no escaping that cold wind! Despite the wind we still had a good time and went out for a couple of rides on the bikes to Studland Bay and Bournemouth.
After three days like I said we’d had enough of the wind and decided to head for the New Forest about 40 miles away where there would be more shelter from the wind. We again had a nice few days camping in the woods with the New Forest ponies paying us a visit in the mornings. We didn’t really do too much just a couple of short rides through the woods and I was prating around with a load of plastic ducks one day that I’d brought after we’d had a heavy downpour and there was now a pond outside the tent!
That weekend there was a Mini Cooper rally going on at the Beaulieu National Motor museum which is only about 5 miles away so we had dozens of mini coopers both new and old at the campsite, it made quite a spectacle in the morning when they all headed off in convoy to Beaulieu.
On the back front I do feel that there is a slight improvement despite me saying in my last update that I didn’t think that there was! I’m definitely more upright and everybody says that I am moving better and not looking so uncomfortable. I can now walk a bit further too before I have to stop and rest. First thing in the morning is also a lot better I’m not struggling to walk downstairs as much, before it was a real effort to go downstairs, I had to hold onto the handrail as I felt so unstable and wobbly! Once I’d managed to get downstairs I would then have to sit down, take my medication and wait half an hour for them to kick in before I was able to do anything! But now I seem to be able to walk down the stairs relatively easy without having to hold onto the handrail! I’m still very hopeful that my back will recover I just think it’s an extremely long and slow process and that maybe because of my trip to Spain where I was away from my normal home environment for a month and everything was new I never noticed any difference, but now I’m back home and everything is familiar again I can notice an improvement! I guess it’s just a case of being patient which is certainly not one of my fortes! After saying all that my back has actually been hurting me quite a bit this last week or so, so I’ve headed west for a few days on the bike to try and ease it a bit!
