Exercise Aid.

I phoned my doctor's office yesterday, to make sure that they had written to the physiotherapy department requesting a home visit for me and, while I was at it, to ask how long it might be before I receive such a visit. It seems that two months is the optimistic going rate; it's not the doctor's fault, but it seems that I am expected to suffer the agonies that are acute back pain for two months for the want of a half hour visit from a specialist to advise me of the exercises that I might find useful and to provide a few hundred pounds worth of equipment to allow my life to continue in reasonable comfort.  It would appear that our health service is intent on converting my acute condition into a chronic one.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, I have a good idea of what is required; I can't reliably stand upright, so any mobility aid must work with me bent over; hence, I need a thing called a gutter frame; it's a variant on a Zimmer but has arm rests to support my weight. My cycling friends will look at it and say, “It‘s got tri-bars;“ devices used by Greg Lemond enabling him to beat Laurent Fignon by eight seconds in the 1989 Tour de France and, coincidentally, really upsetting the upper echelons or the cycling hierarchy.

For exercises, I have, at hourly intervals, been taking a firm grip of this chair and walking sideways around it for two minutes in a clockwise direction. Having wound the system up, it then takes a further two minutes perambulating in an  anti-clockwise direction to unwind. It's a very simple exercise regime, but it does seem to reduce the stiffness I suffer from sitting immobile all day.

Consequently, yesterday evening, I consulted my good friend Amazon and have arranged for said gutter frame to be delivered; with luck, it should arrive on Wednesday.