💚 An Update From James

Dear Patrons,

I hope you are well and thank you for your patience with the content and for all the well wishes I have received.

Firstly, I am okay.

But I also wanted to take the time to be open and honest about what's going on.

Being relentless has finally caught up with me. It's taken 7+ years, but I'm gonna need a little bit of time off.

Many of you may be aware that I've been suffering since Christmas Eve with Sciatica. I bent down to pick up a shoe of Harry's, and my back went. I knew it wasn't your ordinary ‘that hurts’ and once I spoke to my Dad, who suffered badly with Sciatica in the 90s, I knew that my issue was going to be similar.

To cut a long story short, sciatica refers to the sciatic nerve that travels from the lower back through the hips and buttocks and down each leg. It's common, however, for the pain to only be in the right leg. That's where it's at for me. All of it.

General advice on Sciatica is to wait 4-6 weeks, and the pain can ease off by itself. And I thought it was doing so until at the weekend that pain became unmanageable to the extent I was struggling to get in or out of bed.

I won't bore you with the ins and outs of the pain (which basically feels like someone is setting fire to you), but to give you an understanding of just how bad the pain was if Tottenham had played yesterday or today I don't think I'd have gone to the game. I'll be yellow flagged, but should be okay for Crystal Palace in 10 days.

This morning I was taken in an ambulance to North Middlesex Hospital, which is where I was born, in Tottenham and hopefully now I am armed with medication that can help make me better and at least aid the pain caused by the Sciatic nerve.

It's not like a bone or muscle injury where you can put a fixed timeline on an expected recovery. This pain may begin to ease off quickly with the right care and attention, or it may be something that, like for my father, I partially live with for the rest of my life.

But I'm on the mend, I've just done a shit for the first time in nearly 60 hours! You laugh, and I am too now, but it's the truth.

I'm gonna take off as long as I need. I have to. I could wake up in the morning and think ‘let's go’ but it doesn't make sense to rush anything so my intention now is to take the rest of this week off of all recording content and let Suj, Clayton and Nico take care of things for a few days. No one else is going to be doing Ask James or The Deadline Stream, so the content goes a bit ad hoc.

Tomorrow, the guys will do the mini GW Review for everyone and on Friday The Differential Show for Patrons, but as far as I'm concerned, all other content for the week is postponed. If there's any additional content that gets done, think of it as a bonus under the circumstance, and please bear with us.

For Advanced Tier Patrons I will do my best to do the 3 pieces of content for the week that have not been fulfilled, Chip Talk, Hwang v Neto Talking Tactics and the GW26 Team News Stream as short written content so long as I don't have any form of physical setback.

And hopefully, fingers crossed, I'll be back on the mic on Monday. I know that it will be a big week with the Chip Pod next Thursday. I want to be right for it

Thanks again for all your support and understanding. DMs are very much open on Slack if anyone wants me.

James