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.
The review in the spring moved contact from fortnightly to monthly — the first time in three years that the frequency of appointments had gone down rather than up.
The first six weeks changed nothing about the medication. They were spent, instead, watching — a reading logged every few minutes and a diary that took about forty seconds a day to keep.
The hard part isn’t designing the programme. It’s convincing someone in pain that loading the joint is the treatment.
Illustrative composite
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.
“I stopped treating the wait as dead time,” she says. “That turned out to matter more than I expected.”
