Last Monday I was typing away as fast as I could, as I do when my mum is around to wrangle Small Z. I try to knock out as much work as I possibly can, but I can never get it all done, due to sleeping and whispering-to-sleep issues. And also because they often give me more than I can actually do without losing my mind.

So I’m typing away on this particular file. (All names and circumstances changed, for obvious reasons…) I type; “Part of her duties involved collecting trolleys and pushing them from one area to another. She began feeling pain in her left wrist.” I looked down at my left wrist. Still buggered from pushing the pram with the flat tyre too far. Still strapped up. I type; “She continued working. Her wrist pain grew worse. She went to her general practitioner, who prescribed anti-inflammatory medication.”

I blink, and look over at the Voltaren Gel. Which hasn’t helped at all. I type; “She did not find the anti-inflammatory medication helpful.” What a surprise. I type; “She returned to her general practitioner, who referred her to have a cortisone injection to her left wrist.” I gulp. That’s what I have organised for tomorrow. Holy god.

I keep typing. If I was a truly superstitious person I would have just dropped my arm off just below the elbow - like a skink sheds a tail. This woman ended up having multiple bouts of surgery, her wrist was fused. FUSED! And she still then had to endure the phrase that I type quite a lot - ongoing severe chronic pain…which has the lovely associated fun of memory and concentration problems, hideous sleep, general grumpiness, depression and anxiety.

I type files like this with these kind of symptoms every week, but the wrist thing had me spooked. I went and got the cortisone injection yesterday. Am so glad I have experienced childbirth so that I can smirk in the face of all other physical pain (am not sure that sleep deprivation counts), because I got to watch on an ultrasound screen while an annoyingly cocky doctor poked around in my tendon with a needle before shooting in a combination of cortisone and anaesthetic.

When he was finished he double checked with the nurse that he’d administered it to the right tendon. Hello? Because there’s another one there he could have tried. Eeny, meeny, miny, MO! MO! MO! She assured him he had been correct. He looked like he was used to being told he was right. So I asked him whether he’d done it properly and he said of course he had. I was told to lay off typing for the night, which meant I got to go home and finish the bloody wrist file typing with my right hand. Only my right hand. And I left all lifting of Small Z to M. One thing I learnt - take care of your sore bits and give them their rest. I mean, I already knew that, but the wrist-file helped to kind of hammer it home.