This is going to hurt (for ever)

In 2020, Oliver Franklin-Wallis felt an ache in his arms. Three years on, he is one of the millions of people who are forced to live with chronic pain that may never go away

- Oliver Franklin-Wallis

PAIN IS LIKE A MEMORY, a path reinforced every time we walk down it. As such, it’s quite possible that writing this is an act of self-harm. It’s not just that it hurts to write, although it does; it’s that when I started thinking about this piece, reading around it, even jotting down notes, I felt the pain in my forearms flare up again, and for a month or two I considered calling it off. My physiotherapist would call that “avoidance”. I would call it “learning from experience”, given that it was writing that got me here in the first place.

It was late in the summer of 2020 when I started to develop an aching in my forearms: first the left, and a few days later, the right; a vague, untroubling pain, similar to the aftereffects of a workout. I figured, like any reasonable person, that my arms were just tired. I had been typing late into the evenings finishing a book proposal, which, on top of everything else – household jobs, phone usage, the cliched pandemic sourdough baking habit – was taking its toll. (Honestly, have you ever considered just how much you use your hands?)

At that time self-employed and unable to take days off, I made my first mistake: I kept going. I downed ibuprofen and rested when I could. It was only as the pain worsened, spreading from the backs of my hands then into the epicondyles, the bony protuberances on either side of the elbows, that I started to worry. My GP, unfazed, diagnosed me with lateral epicondylitis, or “tennis elbow”, which made me laugh – I haven’t played tennis in years. When the pain spread to the inside of the joint, the diagnosis expanded to include its mirror image, “golfer’s elbow”. (Both are caused by tendon damage but in the opposing muscle groups.) Again, I thought: ha.