To make your daft brain finally accept that you can't blooming walk and you can't blooming carry on like this!
The festival plan
This is how quickly my failing mobility came about. Between Christmas and New Year, end of 2022, I had started a programme in the gym to complement my very regular swimming routine. My left knee was still painful but my physio was confident it was "just pain" and I could work through it, getting fitter and stronger would definitely be beneficial. So the gym it was, I booked in with a trainer, explained my current limitations, got a suitable programme written for me and completed it 3 times a week. January came and the gym was put to one side as jury service commenced. From there I've covered the deterioration in my previous blog. Well, the physical aspects at least. The mental side of understanding exactly what was going on and what was happening to me took a whole lot longer to actually realise. Don't get me wrong, of course I knew what was happening, I lived with this pain day and night, but actually understanding what it was and what it meant took a ton more time to get my head around.
It happened at a festival. In Ireland. In the rain. On my own. It wasn't pretty.
I love live music, in particular I have a favourite singer like lots of us do, and I go see him live whenever I can (to date I've seen him over 100 times since 2017) - so when I saw he was performing at this festival in Ireland with a few names from the 80's that I really liked, and that the festival was small, only in it's second year but with a great reputation... I booked my weekend ticket. With a campervan pass too. I booked this very early on in the year when I thought I had a bit of a meniscal flare up that would resolve. Only by July I needed a knee replacement, but stubborn me still went to the festival in my campervan on my own. Cause that's what I do. By this time I'd already traded my beloved manual car for an automatic cause the clutch aggravated my knee, but still, with a plan and lots of time for regular stops and breaks, I decided to go ahead and drive my manual campervan to Ireland. I arrived really early, stayed the night before the festival site opened in a pub carpark and all was well, the sun was shining and I was seriously very excited to attend my first ever festival. I'd driven to the tiny village where it was all taking place and had a look at the distance I needed to walk, I'd already arranged with the organisers to have a spot closest to the entrance to minimise my walking and it all looked ok. I'd need to pause and sit a few times on the way but it was only a regular 3 or 4 minute walk according to google maps, so about double that for me. I moved to the campervan site as early as I could and set up my stay, very happy with all that was to come.
Then Friday came. Day one of the festival, it wasn't starting til late afternoon, the morning was glorious, my fellow campers friendly and I was comforted seeing so many my age and older, it looked like it really was the "gentle" festival I was hoping for - ok, with the slight caveat that this is Ireland and I've not seen any crowd put the booze away like an Irish crowd, but all the same, this looked to be a bunch of slightly more sensible folk. I don't think I could have been more wrong about that. The gates were due to open at 4pm so at 3.30pm I was slowly making my way down there on crutches with a folding chair hammocked across my back. In a raincoat cause the heavens had opened by this point - of course they had, there was a festival about to commence after all! The gates didn't open and I had to sit down. The rain got heavier. I got soaked. Oh well, an authentic festival experience was going to be had, it would all add to the atmos. It was an hour later before the gathering crowd was allowed in, the security folk were soaked and miserable, the crowd was soaked and miserable but also very keen to seek shelter and beer. And then there was me. I moved as fast as my crutches would carry me to reach the accessible platform and bag my space. It was completely exposed to the elements but that was ok, except it was made of metal and a bit uneven so was full of puddles. Wet metal and crutches don't make for the most stable of combinations when you're trying to stay upright. My new chair was broken on the arm and I was thoroughly fed up. But I persevered cause it was a festival and that's what festivals are like I presumed. My fav singer was hosting the weekend so he flashed on the stage to announce the first act and the woman next to me started dancing. Well this platform was bending and rocking and dipping and I honestly felt so sick. I felt like such a twat cause she was having a lovely time but I had to ask her if she could stop. You can imagine that went down well and she glared at me for the rest of the evening. She was able bodied accompanying a guy in a wheelchair so perhaps she didn't quite get how limiting mobility issues can be. To be fair to her, neither did I until that point. I made it through a couple of acts and then made my way back to my campervan, absolutely soaked to the bone and wondering if I'd ever be dry again. Walking on wet grass was challenging and awkward and very difficult, it took a lot of effort and energy to get back and I cried buckets (just to add to the wetness) when I got back to the van.
Saturday and the day my fav was performing. I was not going to be on the platform for that one, I was determined to be down the front like I always am at all of his gigs. I ventured over slowly during the afternoon, met up with a friend who unexpectedly came along and sat on my back up chair and all was well with the world. Then an hour before he was due on stage the heavens opened again, doors as wide as they could be this time and it was an utter deluge of rain. Despite my huge rain poncho covering both me and my chair, and my hat and hood, I was soaked again. Had to put my chair away to get down to the front and propped myself, my crutches and my chair carefully against the barrier, steeling myself for standing for an hour. It was hard. In that rain. It never relented, bouncing from the edges of the stage a good 2 or 3 foot back upwards. A couple of songs in some dick pinched my hat, turning round caused all my stuff to go sliding on the floor, I was so mad with him, what an idiot. Of course he didn't know I was struggling to stay stood up as it was, nor did he know I was on crutches but all the same, what a stupid thing to do to someone. That was the start of my utter misery at being there. My friend had disappeared, she'd gone backstage (she's connected...) and left me in the rain. I was asked by one of the performers to video the stage, which I assumed meant they assumed I'd be back on that sodding bouncy platform. Daft really but that annoyed me cause I was not on that stage, I was down the front and soaked through and still being asked to do stuff (which obviously they didn't know). It all got a bit disproportionate and I was disappearing down a rabbit hole of rage, disappointment and anger. I was angry and felt so let down cause nobody thought that it would be a really lovely thing to invite me out of the rain too. My friend, her brother, my fav singer, the other singer - all know the issues I've been having, but that thought did not cross the mind of any of them and I was there, in front of the stage, in the bouncing rain, having my hat stolen and crying without anyone noticing. Hey, I get how entitled this sounds but bare with and read on....
Then it struck me. Quite literally like a bolt of lightning. Why would they even consider me. At all. I'm just a fan, one of the crowd, out there doing my thing while they do their thing. How stupid of me to even consider that I might have been thought of.
And in that moment, it all became so clear. That's all I was. A fan. At a festival. In the rain. What on earth was I thinking? Here I was, the person that never says no, the person willing to help anyone and everyone. The person who never puts her own needs first. The person struggling so hard to move myself around a very wet outdoor festival in the pouring rain wondering why others don't think like I do. Wondering why nobody could see the anguish and pain I was in.
The Universe had sent it's haddock and I had been well and truly slapped sideways in a vigorous fashion around the chops - if you're not from Yorkshire, that's the face by the way. It was a very strange moment, I'm there in a muddy field in the rain, the crowd has dispersed, gone to shelter in the beer tents to wait for the next performance and there's me. In all my festival make up and glitter, with my very wet and previously stolen hat, crying buckets cause I did it again... put my focus on others instead of myself... wondering what the hell I'm doing standing in the relentless rain in the middle of Ireland on my own struggling with a bag and a chair, on crutches and feeling like an absolute fool. I called my husband when I eventually got back to the campervan and let it all out, he was very patient and understanding, angry for me, and wanting to do everything and anything for me to not be so unhappy. I made a few decisions that night - I was not staying for Sunday at the festival, the rain hadn't stopped and they were already laying straw on top of the mud, getting through that on crutches would be ridiculous. I would leave and head for the coast early the next morning, find a place with a lovely view and wait it out til early Monday morning when I was due back on the ferry. I also decided that it was time to stop wasting my own energy on the takers who demanded my effort but never reciprocated with their own. I cut a lot of people off that night, and it felt like a release from obligations I didn't have but had created, or possibly had given to me by others that had grown fond of being with me and decided to stick around, feeding off my energy, commitment and time for very little in return. It was likely to be my last time in Ireland. It was right there and right then that I started the process of understanding why I hadn't put myself first. It took an age to get there consciously but in the end I finally understood a whole ton of stuff about myself.
The biggest decision I made was that I needed to do something about my failing mobility, I couldn't bear for it to become any worse, the festival had been so hard for me physically and mentally and while I felt broken, I also felt the strongest I had ever felt because I had lifted the veil disguising all of this and I knew what I needed to do. That was the moment where it all became real and I decided that bariatric surgery was the right option for me.