Patient casebook: Just keep swimming
I needed to find a way to ease my pain Meena Latchman, 49, south London
Snapping photos of the pyramids, I knew my holiday to Egypt would be one I’d remember forever. But as amazing as all the sights were, something was troubling me that summer in 2000.
Back home, I winced as I pulled myself to standing.
‘Are you OK?’ my husband Anthony, then 33, asked.
‘Just my knee again,’ I shrugged.
It was painful to move. In fact, my left knee was completely inflamed.
I reasoned I’d just overdone it.
Yet more than a month passed and the swelling and pain never ceased. So I went to my GP. ‘You could be putting pressure on your joints,’ he suggested.
I was carrying a few extra pounds, so I knew what he was getting at.
If I wanted to stop the pain, I needed to lose some weight.
But walking and jogging only made the pain worse.
By January 2001, things were no better. I was sent to a local hospital for X-rays, and straight away they found a problem.
Underneath my kneecap was a lot of fluid.
‘That’s what’s causing the swelling,’ the doctor explained. ‘It could be a sign of arthritis.’
I knew arthritis got progressively worse.
Over 10 million people in the UK have the condition. And now I was one of them. I thought at first I could try and power through.
But when I had my son Mycal in August 2001, I found it difficult.
I couldn’t get on the floor like other mummies. Found it hard to follow him as he started to crawl.
I knew then that I needed to keep my symptoms at bay. So, I started swimming. Though I’d never been one for doing endless lengths, I knew it’d take the pressure off my joints.
Soon, I was swimming once a week.
Not only could I feel it toning my other muscles, I found it eased the pain in the days that followed.
I upped my swimming to almost every other day.
By the time I had Carlo in
April 2006, I felt more in control of my condition.
And though I’ve been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and my arthritis has spread to other parts of my body, I’ve never felt better.
That’s why the We Are Undefeatable campaign is so important to me.
For people with longterm health conditions, there’s very little that can be done to cure us.
But by keeping active, we can live a happy life.
So while most people missed going to the pub during lockdown, there’s only one place that I wanted to be…
And that’s at the pool.
Over 10 million people in the UK have arthritis