Hello listeners. I hope everyone's doing well this week. As is very often the case, I'm going to kick this episode off with a personal anecdote. Two years ago in April, I had a sports specific injury doing judo training. A beginner did something that was very unexpected and not allowed.

That's why it was unexpected. They stacked me, as we would say, onto my own neck, which is about as

comfortable as it sounds. There was a crunching sound and my right arm went totally limp and I couldn't raise it.

So I used my judo belt as a kind of makeshift sling and took myself off to hospital.

I was put in a neck brace at the hospital and then went through a period of forced meditation

because I was lying flat on my back, completely

immobile, staring at the ceiling for three hours.

I then had an MRI scan.

After this, I went off home in my neck brace.

A few weeks later, there was no word from the hospital, the pain had subsided, and I went

back to training, you know, some judo, karate, some kickboxing, so on.

During this time, I developed what has now become a permanent tingling and numbness, a bit of pins and needles,

down my small finger and ring finger in my hand.

I can't turn my head to one side because it feels like there's something

blocked inside. I've also had bouts of dizziness and as I'm walking from time to time,

we'll just suddenly start sort of drifting to one side and find it really hard to bring myself

back to walking straight, as well as

having had the worst possible toothache you can ever imagine. Now, last week, I received a phone

call from the hospital, two years after my MRI, to ask if I could go in to see the spinal specialist

right now. And I thought, well, that's curious.

Hospitals don't normally call you up and say come over immediately. But I suspect as well that

since this has taken two years, that somewhere along the line, they had lost my MRI and maybe just

...