Although I wouldn’t have believed it a month ago, there is an upside to sciatica.

To some extent this depends on how sympathetic your GP feels, and how happily they’ll write you a prescription for benzodiazepines.

To say that July was not the greatest month I’ve had is something of… an understatement. Personally, professional, physically, romantically – the gods can fuck with you in so many different ways.

I could list all the various things that happened to me in July. The reason I’m electing not to is it was so bloody painful seeing them all collected together in a single paragraph that I had to delete it straight away.

After initially being prescribed entry-level pharmaceuticals to deal with the sciatica, I returned to the GP after about five days for something with more pep. In my defence, I couldn’t walk for longer than 10 minutes without having to sit down, and I’m absolutely desperate to play some part in our annual football tournament at the end of the month.

Being offered a sicknote and a month’s supply of diazepam was almost too good to be true. Unfortunately, work commitments being as they are I really couldn’t take the former, but I almost managed to forget the sciatica for thirty minutes as I limped off to the pharmacy for the latter.

The reaction from certain colleagues in work today when I accidentally let slip what I was being prescribed was as if I’d won a pharmaceutical lottery.

My favourite response was an envious look and a wistful “you’re so lucky”. I felt less lucky two minutes later when same colleague informed me I had to complete a ten-page risk assessment form about my prescription pills and give my manager an update on my benzo-addled state.

He asked me with a less than professional gleam in his eye how they were making me feel. I was tempted to say: “you know in the disciplinary meeting last week when I didn’t appear to give a shit. That’s kinda how they’re working for me”.

I instead sensibly phrased it thus: “It kind of feels like nothing really matters. Not in an empty way, just that I can't be ruffled right now”.

Him: “Wow. That’s so lucky!”

Truthfully, some of the physio exercises I’ve been doing for the sciatica over the last 72 hours have done more for it than the diazepam, but the secondary benefits of stretching only go so far. I had to swallow a smirk when my doctor agreed to prescribe diazepam because I was more than aware that this was going to be treating more than sciatic nerve pain.

After R’s rejection all sorts of melancholy content had started emerging from my mind, and were finding themselves splurged onto Word documents for future blog posts. Probably the worst example of this was my excavation of a relationship dumping I received in 1999 and comparing it to a sniper’s headshot.

Self-indulgent wallowing aside, it was not helping, in the same way building R up into the “Jewish Cleopatra” for the past three months was far from helpful. Thanks to my own purple prose and mythologizing I’d given her superhuman powers of rejection by the time I finally got her out for a drink. I regretted the day I’d ever started committing my thoughts of her to blog, not because there was the inevitable risk I’d have to describe a public rejection, but she’d become a fantasy figure and almost better than reality.

I’m hoping more alternative treatments (the start of the football season and an extended holiday) will wean me off the benzos in the medium term, although for the time being I’m going to keep dropping the repeat prescriptions into the surgery and carry on feeling “lucky”.