Fourteen months is a long time to be told to wait. Mira Adeyemi spent the first four of them doing what most people do, which is as little as possible, because everything hurt.
Three patterns emerged, and none of them were the ones anyone expected. The obvious suspect turned out to be innocent; the quiet one had been doing the damage for years.
The fortnightly call
Progress was not linear. There was a plateau around week nineteen that felt, at the time, like the programme had stopped working. It had not.
The hard part isn’t designing the programme. It’s convincing someone in pain that loading the joint is the treatment.
Nadia Kovač, physiotherapy lead
A year on
Nobody involved describes this as solved. It is managed, and managed is a job you do every day, indefinitely, with better or worse information.
“I stopped treating the wait as dead time,” she says. “That turned out to matter more than I expected.”
Leave a Reply