Keyhole Surgery: Hallelujah.

For about 45 minutes this sunny afternoon I was back in Paris. It was just me, my ankles and an assorted group of health professionals. From the smiling receptionist to the rushed woman who did the x-rays, standing behind her iron screen (radiographer?), to the knowledgeable and confident consultant.

It could have been the Clinique du Sport in the 5th Arrondissement, where I kept the MRI machine warm for Hugo Southwell, or the hospital in Antony, or that other clinic that I sweated my way around the suburbs to find only for results to show that my hamstring was still very much intact.

Today was in Exeter but the all the apparatuses of these visits remained. The interminable waiting around, watching the clock, not wanting to touch the communal magazines despite the knowledge that these patients were injured and not sick. Their germs were the same as mine and their joints just as unstable. I read the Telegraph sport section instead of the Midi Olympique. My fellow patients were just the same, the elderly and their hips. The same, faint excitement from the staff when they realise they have un sportif on their hands.

Then there's my eternal and paradoxical hope that the ankle will still be sore when he does his examination. It would have been typical if it had behaved at exactly the wrong moment, making me look the fool.

And as you read your sports paper, in English or French, you rehearse the story of how you injured the ankle in the first place. You don't tell them how you injured it, that's in the past, all that remains is the story. So you tell them the story of how you injured it - the story that you've been perfecting each time you tell it to each different physio and each different coach.

And after the x-ray people have got their hands on your ankle and lined it up and hid behind their screen and pressed the button, you return to the waiting room. And when the images appear on the doctor's screen, he looks for the abnormality and, hallelujah, he finds something. He calls you in to share the good news. You are injured. There is genuinely something wrong with the joint. Immediately I felt sane again. What joy to be injured, to be officially injured and to know how it is going to be fixed and when you will play again.

I can now haul myself out of this limbo, this lazy, half-assed semi-retirement that I've been wallowing in and circle a date on the calendar. That is when I will run again and play again. I will go under the knife - my stomach churns - and then they will take the stiches out and then I will work hard and then I will play again.