Brain Training

Rob bought me a Nintendo DS Lite on Saturday, to stop me from going stir crazy at home. I'm not much of a computer games fan, but Rob said the shop was doing a package deal on the DS with 2 games that he thought I would enjoy: Brain Training and My Word Coach, a vocabulary game, which I haven't played yet but which looks right up my street.

I set up the brain training one on Saturday afternoon. One of the tests it does to find out the 'age' of your brain is to show a word on screen and you have to say the colour that the word is written in - red, yellow, blue or black. What makes it difficult is that the word itself is a colour - so the word could be 'Blue', but the colour it's written in is red, so you have to say red.

The first time I did it, there were a couple of times when the colour of the word was blue, so I said 'blue', and it said 'Wrong, try again'. It took me a while to realise that the machine isn't all that great at differentiating between when I say 'blue' and when I say 'black'. So I had to enunciate to the point of hilarity - I was pronouncing blue more like 'bloooo' and emphasising the 'ck' on the end of black'; it's a good job no one was listening. I set my profile on the machine, then the next time I did that particular test it still told me to try again a few times even though I'd said the right colour, and at the end of the test it told me my brain was in its 80s... I managed to get this down to 39 by this morning, and even then I could have been better had the machine not mis-heard one of my answers.

I took the DS with me yesterday so I would have something to do while I waited for Rob, Adrian and Ben to do the Test Valley Tour, a 100km bike ride (which they all did brilliantly - well done guys!). Yes, that's right, I finally got out of the house yesterday! The start/finish point was at Hillier Gardens, and I spent the first couple of hours with Sara and the kids playing cricket on the grass (they played, I watched), then after they left I sat in the gardens training my brain.

I think I've turned the corner with my injury. The worst part about it is that every time I get up, whether that be first thing in the morning or just from the sofa during the day, blood rushes to my foot, settling just underneath my ankle bone, which is really painful, and I just have to stand up through the pain until it eases off, or sit back down again and do the same thing the next time - and the longer I leave it, the worse it gets and the longer it takes to ease off. Yesterday morning, however, it took about half the time it usually does for the pain to ease off, and today it took a little less time again. Most of the times I've stood up from the sofa today, it hasn't been particularly painful at all and I've been able to walk on it more or less straight away. I went to the doctor this morning to ask if there was anything I could do to make it get better more quickly, but she said no, I was doing the right thing in doing part-rest, part-exercise, and I just had to be patient. Also the swelling has almost all gone and the bruising has gone down - it's still very colourful but whereas before it was almost all purple, it's now about half-purple, half-greeny yellow, so I think I'm definitely on the mend. I've set myself a goal of being able to drive again by the end of the week.