Putting on socks led me to hell

If anyone who has suffered back pain can do justice to their agony with mere words then I salute you.

It is like being stabbed every time you breathe.

And what heroic physical deed triggered these excruciating spasms? Sitting down and then standing up again after a standard session at the gym - and then 24 hours later putting on a sock.

After it ‘went’ properly, I was perched on the edge of our bed, unable to move for 30 minutes until the spasms stopped long enough for me to stand and shuffle around like an old man, before taking a painkiller left over from my cycling accident last summer and gingerly lay on the bed.

No one else was at home. The kids both study in Liverpool and the boss was watching daughter #2 perform a monologue there. The phone was three feet away but might as well have been on Mars.

After the boss got home six hours later, found me a pot to pee in and dosed me up on painkillers, I thought I’d sleep it off.

Wrong.

Next morning, and after a call to the GP for some stronger medicine, a triage nurse suspected nerve damage and said to call paramedics to get me to the RLI’s accident and emergency department.

After a five-hour wait on a trolley in a corridor outside A&E, where I had so much gas and air I thought I was watching 808 State headline the NME Stage at Glastonbury in 1992, a doctor tried to send me home in my slippers with a packet of tramadol.

I couldn’t even sit, let alone stand, what the hell was he thinking?

So they found a bed on Ward 30, where they pumped me full of muscle relaxant and painkillers and I didn’t move for two days until a physio helped me up for a gentle stroll.

X-rays and an MRI scan came back clear, so it turned out I was just being a big ponce.

No prolapsed disc, no nerve damage, just torn back muscles from doing too much, too soon, after five months out of action with a broken and dislocated elbow.