Well, as I’ve mentioned before my knee hurts. Its grumbled on and off for a good few years. It likes to remind me of the misuse and neglect I’ve subjected my moving parts to since I’ve been capable of moving around under my own steam. It likes to remind me that I’m not 21 and supple in the joints anymore. It likes to remind me that middle age is no longer something that happens to other much older people – it’s happening to me. Now.

However, the best thing to do with such reminders of ones mortality and physical decline is to ignore the symptoms for as long as possible. If you’re a man of a certain age who is determined to insist that you’re still the same finely tuned specimen  you were twenty years ago, this burying the head in the sand mentally can go on for quite sometime. In fact its a tactic that’s served me very well for years. Unfortunately, rather like a certain French Emperor, our own unique and painful Waterloo can be lurking just around the corner.

In my case the final straw for my creaking right knee came in the week after Christmas last year, and was brought on by a change of professional circumstances at work. Bear with me a moment while I explain. Excessive over indulgence by some of my colleagues combined with far too many people being granted holidays (IMHO) had led to a severe staff shortage. Ergo yours truly was going to have to work a bit harder than normal to take up some of the slack. Now over the last few years I’ve been able to be the sort of Aircraft Engineer who mostly stands around drinking coffee in sunglasses on the flight line trying to look cool whilst holding my paunch in. Physical exertion and crawling into the crevices of aeroplanes was deeply frowned upon and only ever undertaken as a last resort. In my world the diagnostic laptop and Bic pen were definitely  mightier than the spanner and hammer.

Unfortunately this life of ease and indolence came to an end last year and for the first time in many years I found myself working back inside in a heavy maintenance hangar. serious stuff, big jobs and lots of crawling around peering myopically at the inner workings of airliners. However, all was not lost. With age does come seniority, and with seniority comes the privilege of watching others struggle for hours before I move in, cast a bleary cataract over their endeavours and hopefully pronounce myself satisfied.

Sorry I’m digressing again. Lets get back to last Christmas and my staff shortages. As I’m sure you’ve guessed due to somehow ending up as almost the last engineer standing in my section of the hangar for a week, and with deadlines still to meet I was forced for the first time in many years contort myself into a very tight crawl space for several shifts and do some serious wiring modification to a reticent Boeing 757. I won’t bore you with the technical details but I spent several consecutive 12 hour shifts kneeling in a very tight space with various awkward shaped bits of metal jammed under my knees and shins. By the end of the week both my knees were protesting quite a lot.

After hobbling around for a week or so wincing whenever I had to kneel down or bend my knees more than 45 or so degrees I was forced to admit this pain wasnt just going to go away just by ignoring it. Yes, my left knee had ceased complaining after a few days but if anything the troublesome old right one had a proper sulk on. Ridiculously tender to the touch, slightly swollen and with a stabbing pain around the knee cap every time I bent it or knelt down, it was most certainly cramping my style. Everyday simple but essential tasks such as putting on my socks or lacing my shoes were agony, any attempt to bend the knee or kneel on it literally brought on tears of pain and some very choice language. Cruelly walking around didn’t hurt much at all which tended to lull me into a false sense of security. Forgetting the knee was sore at all if I’d been standing or sitting still for a while I’d incautiously knee down to look at something or swing my leg up onto a step to climb through an access hatch at work and it would feel as if some malicious bast*^d had plunged a red-hot poker into the side of my knee. It definitely wasn’t funny.

So, we entered the first stage in my usual self-treatment plan for injuries or indeed illness’ of most types. I ignored it and hoped it would go away. After all, ignoring the left knee had worked, so why not the right? Yes, it was taking a bit longer to settle down, but the good old-fashioned British stiff upper lip and fortitude would see me through. It took a good couple of weeks of wincing, swearing and avoiding kneeling down to get through this phase. Ignoring it wasn’t working. Convincing myself it just needed more time was wearing a little thin also.

It was time for stage two – internet based self diagnosis. If you google ‘knee pain’ you get 8,330,330 results. Narrowing this down to ‘pain underneath knee cap when bending’ trims this down to a handy 4,190,000 hits. So a few happy evenings were spent reading all about mysterious ailments such as ‘Patellofemoral pain syndrome’, ‘Patellar tendinitis’, ‘Bursitis’, ‘Osgood Schlatter Disease’ and many more that I can’t be bothered to spell. The trouble is each evening I’d convince myself I had a different condition. Bursitis was the starting favourite till I discovered it was also known as ‘Housemaids Knee’ (not a very cool sounding thing to have!) For several days I was sure I’d irreparably torn my Meniscus cartilage and was gloomily resigning my self to joining the waiting list for keyhole knee surgery. Finally I settled on ‘Patellofemoral pain syndrome’ because as far as I could tell it just meant your knee really, really hurt and nobody was sure why.

With the first two stages out of the way I could now move confidently onto stage three, – self-treatment. Many of the knee pain self-help websites I’d been furtively frequenting during stage 2 had mentioned the possible benefits of applying support tape around the offending joint to ‘aid healing’ and ‘increase blood flow to the damaged tissue’. A few quick searches of everybody’s favourite internet based retailer that has everything had a role of lovely blue stretchy physio tape winging its way to my doorstep. Now how to apply it? This time YouTube came to the rescue. There are lots of helpful instructional video’s out there showing taping virgins like myself how to cocoon their aching joints in stretchy blue tape to the best effect. After watching a few of these videos however you can’t help noticing a bit of a pattern. Firstly nearly all the ‘patients’ having their legs taped up just happened to be young, female, attractive and wearing very short shorts. Secondly, the ‘expert physiotherapist’ applying the tape was nearly always rather creepy, American and clearly enjoying ‘rubbing the tape down briskly to activate the adhesive backing’ far too much.

So much to my wife’s amusement I sat on the edge of the bed the next morning and before performing the parody of pain that had accompanied getting my trousers and socks on without bending my right leg, carefully applied the various lengths of tape above and below the offending joint as shown by the slightly breathless Americans on their YouTube channels. Confident that at last that a pain free day was in the offing I set off for work. There was however one vital element I had overlooked. One tiny miscalculation that was to prove catastrophic……… hairs. The one tiny detail that differentiates my lower limbs from the lithe tanned and toned examples on the YouTube videos.(Well to be absolutely accurate it would also be difficult to describe my legs as lithe, tanned or toned either if I’m being brutally open and honest.) Its fair to say my lower limbs are most definitely more towards the rather hirsute end of the human condition, and now I was walking around with literally thousands of hair follicles trapped under lots of generously applied sports tape.

While the tapes adhesive backing was nice and fresh (having been vigorously rubbed to activate it in the comfort and privacy of my own bedroom) things weren’t too bad, ok it was a little uncomfortable and the strapping restricted my movements a bit but surely that was a sign it was doing its job supporting my knee? However as the day wore on the glue slowly started to release its grip on my skin and the tape started to contract and want to peel off. Unfortunately its sticking powers to the individual hairs on my upper and lower leg seemed undiminished and slowly and exquisitely painfully it started to remove the said hair from my skin every time I moved my leg. Well it certainly made me forget about how much my knee was hurting for the rest of the day. It was a very long afternoon………

After a very long hot bath whose temperature was just enough to soften the glue without melting my skin I was forced to review my treatment plan. My eyes strayed to the packet of disposable razors the ladies of my household kept for the purpose of denuding their own lower limbs of the odd stray hair. When I emerged from the bathroom it was immediately obvious I hadn’t fully considered the visual impact of the change I’d wrought on just my right leg. Looking dolefully in the mirror it did look like I was wearing a one-legged pair of hair shorts and a hair sock with a white chickens leg in between them. The effect was certainly quite arresting, and not in a good way. this sacrifice of my body hair did allow me to religiously tape up the offending knee without undue pain for the next week or so till I ran out of nice blue torture tape. Did it make any discernible difference? Nope, no, nada, bug*$r all, and to add insult to injury a worrying proportion of my leg hairs seemed to be growing back in several fetching variations of grey.

Back to the internet then in search of a different sure fire wonder cure. Knee braces / supports / straps – they come in a bewildering variety of styles and sizes, all of which claim to be the only one which could possibly help, and they all seem to have 5 star reviews and testimonials on the usual giant shopping website of everything. the first one I ordered was a simple strap with a padded bulge in the centre which the rather disappointing and vague instructions told me just to tighten around my leg with the pad under my kneecap. ‘Steve’ from Wisconsin had boldly proclaimed that this strap had ‘transformed my life overnight’ ‘Sandy’ from Kansas promised that I’d be pain free for the first time in years. All I can say is Americans must have different shaped knees. All it did for me was become an unwanted ankle bracelet after about 5 minutes of walking around with it on. If I tightened it up enough to stop it falling down it rubbed the skin from the back of my knee.

The next one I  tried was a fetching red neoprene wraparound number with a sculpted hole for my errant knee cap to poke through. I’d measured my leg exactly as instructed in the helpful online size guide and guess what? My leg just happened to fall exactly on the border between two sizes………why does that always happen when ordering online? reasoning that neoprene was quite stretchy I ordered the smaller of the two sizes and to be fair the fit wasn’t too dreadful. It seemed to support my knee ok, and the layer of neoprene cushioning my knee most definitely took the edge of the painful business of kneeling down. There were downsides however. Like the strap of pain / ankle ornament it had made very little difference to the pain and it wasn’t half sweaty to wear. In fact coming to the end of one particularly long 12 hour shift that I’d spent cramped up in a hot sticky aircraft flight deck I became aware that there was a most definite whiff coming from the region of my right trouser leg. Fragrant it was not, in fact the damn thing smelt as bad as a tramps second best pants.

By this time it was mid February and I was rather depressed and ready to admit defeat and throw myself on the mercy of the medical profession. I’d resigned myself to waiting ages for some teeth sucking consultations followed by a long period of further pain on a waiting list for some corrective knee rebuilding surgery of some sort or other. Things were looking pretty bleak and I was already thinking that id probably be off the bike most of the spring and summer. Fast forward to mid March and I was pretty much cured, well almost pain free and beginning to exercise again with caution and even knee down and tie my youngest lads football boots without wincing.

Was it a miracle? Did I suddenly jump to the front of the NHS queue? Did I find the right knee strap?

None of these things. I took 3 weeks off work and did nothing. Thanks to my companies leave policy of ‘use it or lose it’ I’d managed to accrue quite a lot of leave which I suddenly found out I had to take more or less straight away before the end of March. So I found myself on the sofa at home unexpectedly with nothing planned. The kids were all at school, the wife was at work and with nothing pressing to do I watched a lot of Game of Thrones, Homes under the Hammer and lots of bad westerns on daytime TV. And my leg improved. Not suddenly or overnight, but improve it did. Rest and time as all the best wise people say are indeed great healers, much more effective than dodgy internet advice and a cheap knee brace. It’s not all milk and honey, I still get the occasional twinge if I twist the knee unexpectedly or kneel down suddenly, but its all manageable. If I ride for more than a couple of hours it aches, but then so does the rest of me! A gentle build up of mileage and no big gears for a while should allow me hopefully to strengthen the knee without a relapse.

So, conclusions? well, getting older still sucks when it comes to injuries. The internet is good at convincing you of anything if you look hard enough, and a lot of ‘expert physiotherapists’ and Personal Trainers on YouTube are having too much fun. Oh, and don’t believe most Amazon reviews for knee supports.