It’s 8.30am Friday morning and I’m walking along hospital passageways en route to the operating theater. The blue surgical gown set off nicely by my Five Ten Freeride sneakers. If you’re getting sliced and diced you might as well do it in MTB style hey!

With the severity of the AC joint injury from Sunday’s crash, combined with it being on my dominant side and my work involving lifting, it was a pretty straightforward decision to undergo surgery ASAP. The plan was to reconstruct the AC joint using a hamstring taken from my leg, which practically involves drilling holes through the various shoulder bones and zip tie’ing the whole shebang together with the borrowed tendon.

Before I knew it I was waking up in post op, super groggy with a comfortably numb left shoulder and arm that felt more like a leg of lamb swinging in the breeze off a piece of wire versus part of my body.

Here’s hoping!