BY the time you’re reading this I’ll be three days posthip replacement surgery and probably beseeching my better half to bring me another chocolate digestive.
This will be the first time in 25 years I’ll have stopped working for longer than two weeks. It’ll be a weird head space to be in. A bit like ‘Red’ in Shawshank Redemption – you become institutionalised.
Maybe after two or three weeks I’ll start enjoying the separation from my laptop. Who knows, maybe I’ll never write another sports article again and be done with journalism.
Instead, I’ll go for long walks up the Cavehill, take deep gulps of fresh air and marvel at nature.
Amid the anticipated pain – and crunching on chocolate digestives, Naproxen and paracetamol – it’ll be good to pull back the lens from the daily grind. That part I’m looking forward to.
There’s also this completely inarticulate thought running around my head that getting a new hip will allow me to reclaim my youth; that I’ll be back playing reserve team football before Christmas and I’ll be able to put my left sock on without dreading the arduous task every morning, and I won’t need a pillow between my legs to sleep.
The grumpiness that this mangled, arthritic left hip generates in me will disappear like a summer shower. I’ll be a new man.
I’ll no longer climb out of my car in instalments and limp doing the school run. I’ll not dread going for a walk ever again and my left side won’t decide to give way without any warning.
Anyone with similar hip pain (mine is bone on bone in the groin) will testify it has an ageing effect on you.
I was 18 or 19 the first time I had the first hint of pain in the area. It was slightly discomforting but rarely stopped me from training or playing sport – until I went up to head a ball at Knockbreda’s pitch one Saturday afternoon.
I could still point to the spot where I rose and a split second later lay in a crumpled heap in pure agony.
For the next week I walked, hobbled, at a 45-degree angle and climbed the stairs on all fours.
My mid-20s was the beginning of the end.
Up to that point I’d never had any back trouble.
I’m convinced all the subsequent injuries I suffered originated from the weakness in my hip, which I assumed was a slight groin strain that just never went away.
We pounded the hard surfaces every Tuesday and Thursday night, did little in the way of stretching and wouldn’t have known what resistance bands or foam rollers were.
My playing career ambled on. Towards the end I’d be fit for three weeks and out injured for the next four. It was a soul-destroying cycle.
In many ways, retirement from competitive football was a relief. But there was always five-a-side twice a week that provided a soft landing of sorts.
But you were always just one innocuous injury away from never kicking a ball again. Another retirement – only of a more definitive kind.
The back goes again, and you press pause on your five-a-side career.
A year or so passes and you think you can make a comeback. But you can’t. You’re kidding yourself. Your body is shouting at you to stop this nonsense.
You give it a go anyway but realise that you can only run in straight lines and the young bucks around you are breezing past you like you weren’t even there.
Like you’re some kind of old man trying to relive his youth. There’s a humiliation in watching youngsters putting the ball through your legs and you turning slower than a double-decker bus.
But you hold onto every last, fading positive. Being able to run in straight lines is something at least.
So, I take to the roads. There’s absolute freedom running the roads in the dark even if the consultant who told me seven years ago that a new hip was inevitable added that I should maybe reconsider pounding the pavements.
Running in straight lines comes to an end too.
One wet, wintry night, I limp all the way home.
Gyms are the most boring places on earth. The cross trainer is mind-numbing but it’s the only cardio on offer these days.
I limp towards this contraption a couple of times per week and limp out of the gym’s doors and back to my car.
I met John McCloskey for an interview at St Mary’s University last year.
He brought me resistance bands to help build the muscles around the hip.
You’ve a thirst for knowledge for anything remotely related to hip injuries. I remember interviewing Conor McManus in the Hillgrove Hotel.
By the end of the interview, I had him demonstrating hip exercises.
How that man has played for so long when his hips would be on fire for days after a game of football is astonishing.
‘Shorty’ Shiels is another man who continues to defy medical opinion.
“There’s a humiliation in watching youngsters putting the ball through your legs and you turning slower than a double-decker bus
The Dunloy wizard has had hip trouble for the best part of a decade and is still steering the Cuchullains ship.
He’ll be in Ballycastle on Sunday, pulling strings.
By the time you read this, I’ll probably have had another couple of chocolate digestive biscuits and Sky Sports News will be on a loop.
The laptop will be stowed away and I’ll enjoy pondering life.
There’ll be plenty of comfort eating over the next couple of weeks and I’ll sit patiently on my sofa waiting to reclaim my youth.
Miracles do happen…