I have had increasingly irksome middle-aged ailments come at me recently, but not recently in the kind of way that you actually DO anything about them. Much more slowly, lichen-like, or like the slow growth of stalactites where you start with a youngish underground cavern and the drip drip drip of mineral-rich droplets of water eventually ends up a giant misshapen erectile lump. My weird ailments have occurred over a few years I guess, rather than a millennium, but you get the drift.

What, I hear you ask, have I grown upon my person? What bodily appendage has hardened over time into some grotesque natural grotto? Do you have lumps?

Well, yes, I do, and then some. There’s the neck, which I may have written about before. It doesn’t work and hasn’t for some time. It hurts, it makes me move like a robot, and it is dangerous when I am driving or trying to cross the road because I cannot see what is coming up on the left or the right. It isn’t particularly stylish, the way my neck won’t work properly. I find my stiff neck embarrassing. 

I had a long neck when I was a more youthful person and my parents would often tell me it was a good one. I thought my longish neck contributed to my pinhead look (sizeable body with small head perched quite loftily atop) but generally didn’t think anything more about it, being much more concerned with my cellulite and my bum. (I was obsessed about my bum – I would wake up early to do the Rosemary Conley Hip Butt and Thigh workout and felt extremely bad about fat consumption, drank litres of water every morning before breakfast and when I got a 50cc scooter, would rattle off slowly to the gym before school to do step classes to get the small bum of my teenage dreams (n.b. none of this worked)).

Well, I should have been concentrating on preserving neck mobility – who knew? Now my neck is my number one train of thought all the time, pretty much. 

Questions remain: 

1. Is my neck stiff because I wore too many babies in a sling? Have I been looking down at my stupid phone more than anyone else? Was it years of hauling groceries from Waitrose into the flat, or lugging the double buggy up the stairs? Perimenopause? Walking the dog and getting yanked too many times by his dumped-chickenbones-rubbish bin-lurching thing? I don’t know, and nor does the rheumatoid arthritis doctor, the GP, the physio, or the osteo. They do agree there’s some kind of muscular shortening thing that means I have neck and shoulder muscles that my gym-obsessed younger teens would die for…it’s just hidden under my middle-aged spread. The osteo has suggested hypnotherapy in case I have buried trauma. I keep wondering what terrible thing I might have squirrelled away but can think of nothing.

2. Is the stiffness related to the newish apparent lumpiness? My neck has developed uneven bands delineated by deep creases and one band hangs lower than the other. I have asked the skin doctor if some botox might help but she’s like…’nah, that’s way too hard to fix’.

3. Is the stiffness and the fatty bands related to the pigment problem which appeared a few years ago after a particularly hot summer in Turkey? Half of my neck is kind of brown and the other bit under my chin stays stubbornly white even when I try to even it out. Hyper pigmentation, probably from those pesky pregnancies again, all of which adds to the layers of bad neck feelings.

The upshot of all this neck stuff is that I think about my neck a lot. If you catch me mid stare, eyes unfocused and aimed somewhere indistinct, it’ll be because I am musing over my neck. I had for years the Nora Ephron book ‘I feel bad about my neck’ and I never read it because it lookedboring and only for old people and now, I know exactly what that Nora was on about. 

Other growth

About a year ago I noticed a large lump on my lady bits, the size of a small testicle. I googled and thought it was a Bartholin cyst. A friend suggested I pop it with a needle after a soak in the bath which I did try to do, but (thankfully) I couldn’t quite pierce the skin right. I eventually made use of the private healthcare and gathered up all of my middle-agedlady issues in one go, crying at the first appointment and telling the poor man how unstable I was feeling. He prescribed drugs for a low thyroid and then got me to see a whole other department about the lump. This was a bit awkward because the lump only becomes apparent when I stand up, and so I had to have multiple ultrasounds while standing over a poor ultrasound person who sat on the floor with his/her ultrasound wands, eye-level with my bits.

The worst was when I got referred to a handsome man doctor. A handsome man doctor who was fanciable. He had to sit on the ground with his rubber gloves and I stood akimbo above him and just winced as he tried to locate the lump. This man was a varicose vein doctor and part of this diagnosis meant he had to feel my upper thighs for any evidence of more varicose veins. He gently touched my inner thighs up and down and up and down and it was MORTIFYING. Also quite nice. But MORTIFYING.

It all ended up with me being admitted for day surgery with more of the handsome man and more of me baring my nether regions, a general anaesthetic, compression pads, dissolvable stiches, and three days of legitimate lying down. I went back to see the handsome man doctor last week and had to show him the results of his marvellous work. It was still mortifying, though I was bolder this time and made some crack about pulling veins out of chicken thighs and he told me that’s exactly why he’s a vegetarian. I now have some scar tissue, bruising, but a much neater lady garden and absolutely no small lumps. It is a mons miracle! And I really liked that manand wonder if I could in fact develop more varicose veins so I could see him again. I think they call this Munchausen Syndrome.

There’s more to tell – we went to Salzburg for Mark’s birthday and nearly got stolen by a big Austrian ski instructor. But that’s for another day. Some pics to send you off:

A sunny Sunday in the garden. We have all been trying to vitamin D our acne and eczema away:

Haircuts for the curly ones:

Still cute though increasingly sassy (aka plain rude):

A birthday for the old fella: