I burned off the calories, took all the pain – but all that working out has damaged my hip

On the screen it appears as a smudged white halo against the blackness. It doesn’t look like anything in particular, but this X-ray represents so much of me: the lottery of parentage, combined with certain behaviour patterns – a soggy euphemism for appetite – that in turn are combined with efforts to mitigate those behaviours. I have, my consultant tells me, developed osteoarthritis in my right hip. In the next year or so it would be ideal if I had a new one, pandemic permitting. Until then, limp on.

The diagnosis is not a revelation. I have been hurting on and off, and more on than off recently, for more than a year. But I do feel hard done by. The shallowness of my hip joint made this more likely, as did my size, both a genetic inheritance, at least in part. But I’m stone cold certain that the blame also lies with my use of the stair machine at the gym.

Continue reading…
Source: The Guardian