Ham: An Almost Fatal Overdose

I was going to write a whole post about how going to Paris for fashion week triggered a deep seated body image trauma that I didn’t even know I had (or at least had managed to bury), but something weird has happened to my leg/legs and so I’m going to tell you about that instead. Because why on earth would I write a considered post about body image and the evils of the modelling industry/patriarchy when I could wang on about my swollen ankles and the strange, unexplained tendon injury I find myself nursing?

I know which one I’d rather read. There’s nothing more fascinating than listening to other people talk about their ailments. OK, perhaps being forced to hear a detailed account of their dreams always rates highly on the scintillating entertainment scale,* but illnesses and minor health woes? Who doesn’t like sitting through a blow-by-blow account of an emergency ear wax removal procedure?

*note thinly-veiled sarcasm.

We shall start with the swollen ankles. I haven’t had these since late stage pregnancy with my first baby, who was born at 42 weeks weighing nine pounds eleven ounces. By the time my waters broke my feet were the same width as my calves with no discernible ankle in between. One long sausage, skin stretched tight.

I was in no rush to get the baby out. People kept stressing me saying it was dangerous and risky the further overdue I went but I reasoned that the baby would eventually emerge, it couldn’t stay in there forever, and anyway I had work to finish off and I was very happy doing that. Ta ever so. In retrospect maybe I wasn’t mentally prepared for the change. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that we were renovating a house throughout the pregnancy, and I mean FULLY RENOVATE NO WALLS OR FLOORS LEFT, not “renovate” like people bandy the word around on Instagram where they’ve changed the colour of the fire surround and added a velux in the loft. Renovate as in, there was no way anyone could live there. No windows. No pipes. No electricity, often.

We hadn’t planned to have a baby at the same time as renovating, it’s the curse of Grand Designs. It’s just something that happens. Kevin McCloud, that utter rake, he stops in to discuss Passivhaus strategies and then ends up ravishing the lady around the back of the static caravan.

We weren’t on Grand Designs, alas, but I still managed to get pregnant and all of the building work was already scheduled in and couldn’t be postponed, and so off we went for seven months to live in a series of very small holiday lets, sans the cat because holiday lets don’t take kindly to cats.

Where am I going with this?! Ankles!

Haven’t had turgid ankles since 2015. Why this week? I’ll tell you: ham. You have to try and stay with me on this one, because it sounds mad and unlikely, but I’m positive that I’m the first human to have almost fatally overdosed on prosciutto.

Photo by Allan Francis on Unsplash

Ecoutez. On Monday last week I met my friend for “dinner” but actually dinner ended up being a bottle of champagne each and an enormous charcuterie platter from which I think I ate approximately 400g of Parma ham. And a fair bit of cheese. A small bowl of olives. Bread with very, very salted butter.

On Tuesday I went to Paris, ate a pat of salted butter on the Eurostar (with bread! I’m not insane!) and then I ate a plateful of ham at the Hotel Costes. Hotel Costes isn’t especially famous for its ham, neither, I expect, would it want to be associated with ham particularly, because it’s an achingly cool, dark, highly sexually-charged sort of place where, if anything, you’d go to have Oysters. I also had two margaritas and licked all of the spicy salt from the outside of the glass. I’m sure the hotel staff were thrilled to have me there.

On Wednesday, still in Paris, I had ham for breakfast (both straight and within an omelette) and then had a bit more Parma ham (and Serrano, and dry-cured French) from a charcuterie platter in a bistro for lunch. In all, over the course of about forty-eight hours, I think I probably ate around the equivalent of (not exaggerating) twenty supermarket packs of Parma ham. The Tudors had nothing on me and my overconsumption of meat. The irony that I was in Paris to see the Stella McCartney show was not lost on me.

I’d like to insert a disclaimer here: I do not usually eat this much meat. I don’t really know what happened to me, it was as though all of the ham stars aligned and it just kept appearing and making its way into my mouth. I woke up on Thursday, back at home and in my own bed, and I honestly felt as though I’d been on a Vegas bender. I was so thirsty! My skin smelled odd! And then, when I swivelled my legs out of bed to put my slippers on, I noticed that my ankles had totally disappeared.

There was a bulge of flesh where the ankles had once been, and they were scored with a red welt all the way around where the swollen skin had obviously pressed against the top of my trainers. Beneath that, I had feet that could only be described as rectangular. I’m going to just throw this out there: I’ve always had a fine turn of the ankle and foot. Shapely. Narrow. I’d like to say I’ve taken it for granted in the past but that would be a lie; I have admired my own ankles and feet frequently with the idiotic glee normally only displayed by the sort of adult who “loves unicorns”. There is no other part of my body I particularly admire or see as being a cut above anyone else’s; nothing standout or miraculous. It all does the job, but no longer would I stand in front of a full length mirror and feel particularly amorous towards the reflection. My ankles though. Marvellous. Wrists also. Very petite and delicate.

But my ankles were nowhere to be seen on Thursday. By the night time I was worried. Where had they gone? Would they come back? I googled. Found out that it could mean a myriad of serious things but also that disappearing ankles could be caused by consuming too much salt.

Well that didn’t seem like something I had a problem with… until I remembered the HAM!!!! I had eaten so much ham that I had made my own ankles vanish! I must have consumed ridiculous quantities of salt, once you added in the margarita-licking and the butter pats and the (ahem) various cheeses.

Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash

Who would have thought you could overdose on ham? No wonder I had an elevated heart rate for three days straight! (Info courtesy of my Oura ring, gatekeeper of my vital statistics.) This just goes to prove the point that everything should be done in moderation. Even water can be dangerous if you have too much of it - ham? Proceed with caution.

My second ailment (yes, there’s more of this post) is something that might or might not be linked to the ham consumption. I have to be honest, when I pitched the “overdosing on ham” possibility to the A&E nurse, he wasn’t massively convinced by it. But he was also quite stressed and busy and I’m not sure he gave it the consideration it truly deserved.

Why was I in A&E? Suspected ankle fracture, foot fracture, torn ligament, tendonitis and about another six or seven scenarios that were presented to me by the Ai search section on Google. Which we all know is highly accurate. All I knew for sure was that I couldn’t bear weight on my right foot and if I did, and it was at the wrong angle, the pain was excruciating. Enough that I endured a three hour wait in A&E on a Sunday late morning/early afternoon, the prime part of the day. I was worried that I had somehow sheared a splinter of bone from my ankle and that it was sawing through a nerve every time I put my foot down, for that is exactly what it felt like.

Of course all the pain entirely disappeared the moment I sat in the chair in the examination room and removed my rubber Birkenstock. That nurse took my foot in hand and wiggled it in every direction possible and was there even the slightest hint of a pain? No there was not. Even when he stretched my toes downwards so that I was en pointe I couldn’t feel anything - it was as though my whole leg had turned to wood.

We finally coaxed a bit of pain out by tipping the foot sideways and then putting pressure on it, but honestly it was an intense kind of goose chase. Nothing makes you feel more fraudulent and stupid than finally getting to the front of the A&E queue to find that your symptoms have waned or disappeared. And to think I had hobbled in sweating because the shooting pain had been that intense, mere hours before. I’m pretty sure the nurse thought I had issues. I don’t think it helped my case that I started wanging on about prosciutto.

Apparently it’s just a little tendon thing and I need to rest the foot. But what I want to know is could it all have been caused by ham?! If so, there should be some sort of warning on it. Don’t eat more than half a kilo of this over 48hours, or similar. Did you read about the man who almost died from eating three kilos of Haribo? How I mocked him, privately, when I read that article. What a berk, I thought!

Is any food safe to overdose on? Carrots? I’d expect cucumber would be safe as it’s mainly water, but you never know. I can tell you that chickpeas are NOT a food you should eat in vast quantities before a long journey with sporadic toilet access. Restaurants should be banned from serving falafel with a side of hummus dip, that’s all I can say.