Life for me has never been either straight forward or easy but luck, if there is such a thing, has left me reeling this time.

Many of my followers know my story but for those who don’t know what’s been happening here’s a brief outline: it all started with a trip to the doctors for a simple blood pressure test, it was high but I wasn’t bothered anyway I had an important bit of shopping to do after I’d picked Yvonne (my long suffering wife) up. We were off to Morrison’s not for shopping, oh no that was a by product, I needed chocolate and the biggest bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate I could lay my hands on. Funny that, because I’m diabetic and it was running out of control even though Yvonne was begging me to sort it out but I was indestructible.

As I was about to set off my phone rang, it was my GP. In short he dropped a bombshell, “well you say you can’t lose weight because your medication won’t let you, you say you can’t walk because of pain in your knees and hips, now we find your diabetes is hopeless and your blood pressure’s off the scale. Well done! I’ll give you a month to live!”

I never bought that chocolate. Indeed I cut my food rations down by half, sorted my sugar intake out, getting my diabetes out and most importantly I actually started walking. That first walk was only a few hundred yards but by the time I reached home I was gasping for air and nearly collapsing on the doorstep. At that time I used special scales weighing in at over

25 stones 5 pounds.

Keeping up my strict regime I weighed in at 18 stone, a loss of around 7.5 stones. I was walking in all weathers, I became terrified of putting on weight again and damn the weather or hunger.

I never felt well though, coughing up phlegm and lots of it. Eventually I saw a nurse practitioner at the GP’s surgery who said my chest was clear and was very dismissive. However that night I became seriously ill, collapsing next to our bed unable to get up. Waiting 4 hours for the ambulance made things critical, the ambulance people thought I’d got pneumonia and worse still sepsis.

It took 4 firefighters and the ambulance people to carry my lifeless, limp body down our twisted staircase arriving with blue lights flashing me away to resuscitation at Norwich Hospital.

I can’t remember most of it but apparently I was very delusional screaming, shouting, swearing, thinking the walls themselves were trying to eat me. I was between life and death, but eventually well enough for life saving surgery to drain the fluids that were collapsing my lungs through that blood poisoning. My chances of survival were less than 50%. As Covid was at its height I had no visitors and being in hospital seriously ill was not pleasant. Eventually the massive drains in my chest were removed and soon after I was released.

So that’s it then, err NO within 2 weeks I was back in again with Sepsis and pneumonia. This time I escaped an operation but was extremely poorly. It was great to get home again and I was going to enjoy myself. I still wasn’t well but I’d started walking again, managing a mile which wasn’t too bad as my maximum distance walked for charity was 6.5 miles coinciding with my 65th birthday.

Well as I said I wasn’t feeling too good as was proved very shortly afterwards when I slipped down one of our house steps. Landing hurt like jiggery, nowhere near as much as it hurt when I grabbed my lower leg which was totally pointing in the wrong direction straightening it out to where it should have been. It was at this point I woke our neighbours with my screaming.

12 hours later in A&E firstly I was congratulated on nearly straightening my leg perfectly then I was diagnosed as having a broken lower leg, ankle, with muscles and tendon trauma as well. On top of this, severe blisters had formed, halting surgery for quite a time. Eventually I had an operation screwing the bone in the leg together. As the plaster casts were removed in the final stages of healing those blasted screws slapped clean in half and I felt a different sort of pain.

Eventually I was declared mended but I still had shed loads of pain. Phoning up I was reassured and told to ring back in a month. That I did only to find I’d been discharged. So my GP wrote asking for an urgent appointment which through Covid, waiting lists, strikes and holidays happened on 15th May this year.

We were ready to fight my corner, we wanted answers. The pain was getting worse every day stopping me walking. It had become so very painful that I’d resorted back to using sticks to walk. Indeed to help you understand the pain, if I was to wash up I needed morphine, in reality I was using morphine to do anything, it was just wrong.

We certainly weren’t ready for what came next though. He showed us on the X-rays that I’d been very unfortunate enough to have severe arthritis in the whole area with bones grinding on each other. There is no cure! The only last resort thing they may offer was total fixing of all the bones so the foot and leg are immobilised taking away walking in its natural form.

There was a downside though, he said, “no surgeon will operate on you as you're far too heavy, your BMI is 41 you’ve got masses of weight to lose and I can’t see you doing that. Would you like to be referred to others that can help with your weight.”

“Yes please,” I replied.

Well I entered full on depression with Yvonne totally gobsmacked. We were in a world of hopelessness.

Well that’s how it seemed until I remembered he had pretty much said I couldn’t lose weight or walk on my own. That was it, that red flag to a bull thing happened, I’d proved the Doctor wrong once I’m going to do it again. So on May 16th my food rations are back to lower levels as they’d gone back up through depression with not walking. My sugar levels are getting the Neville treatment as well, but most importantly I’m walking again and taking pictures.

I’m only able to walk very short distances as every step is painful. I've cut the morphine down drastically, thankfully as that’s strong medication with its own severe side effects. Actually I’ve found my body’s natural endorphins help greatly. Yes, I’m near tears sometimes using those crunchy bones but I’m going to do this and I’ll get to a size where I can consider for myself if I go for complete fusion of the leg, ankle and foot. I want to be the driver in charge of my destiny, not a puppet doing what I’m told.

My pieces in the magazine may alter through this but I intend making it more interesting hopefully with an unusual journey. Of course I’m keeping going on the Facebook group Wymondham Ways as well walking and photographing things on dry/safe days on non dangerous routes.

As a footnote I’m not going the electric wheelchair route as I’m prone towards being lazy and once I’m sat in one of those things you’ll never get me out of it again…

It’s going to be tough, it’s going to be different but by heck it’s not going to be boring so please join me on a journey that some may want to try themselves. Now that would be brill.