Me, My Back and Dr Who ; (1) Our Theatre Critic Knows Only Too Well the Agonies David Tennant Felt When a Prolapsed Disc Put His Hamlet Out of Joint. Here's His Dramatic Tale(2) Health & Reviews

Summary

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ALAS, poor David Tennant, whose prolapsed lumbar disc stopped him from playing his first night Hamlet in London. I feel for Tennant, dispatched for immediate back surgery. I feel for myself too. Although I have never needed to face the surgeon's knife, I think I know the sort of pain Tennant had been suffering.

For I and slipped discs have a dramatic history. We have been painfully together on and off for about two decades. Indeed, I watched Tennant's Stratford-upon-Avon press night in August stuffed with paracetamol and ibuprofen. As the play was launched on the battlements of Elsinore, sciatic nerve pain gripped my calf its location a likely sign of something significantly awry. Tennant was months away from his prolapse, while I was just a couple of weeks away from being diagnosed with my fifth, or is it sixth? I have intentionally lost count of the number of times that my discs have laid me low, confined to beds and sofas, hardly able to sit or stand. I recall how I would totter in the pained, tentative decrepitude of someone ancient on their last legs, feeling as if I were dressrehearsing for my own impending senility.

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Me, My Back and Dr Who ; (1) Our Theatre Critic Knows Only Too Well the Agonies David Tennant Felt When a Prolapsed Disc Put His Hamlet Out of Joint. Here's His Dramatic Tale(2) Health & Reviews

Would I ever be right again? Well, yes, up to a fairly good point.

My condition has led me these past 20 years to various neuro and orthopaedic surgeons for diagnosis, osteopaths, physiotherapists and chiropractors for prevention or cure. I have been scanned (showing thin discs), massaged, ultrasounded and i...

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