There are certain subjects you should avoid if you want to maintain harmony in the room. Politics and religion are the classic examples. In my office, we’ve come to a collective understanding that we don’t discuss the ripeness of fruit.
And productivity has doubled!
It began with bananas. The question of when a banana is best to eat divides opinion in the way that Catholicism divided Elizabethan England. Obviously the green ones they sell in the supermarkets (I’m talking bananas now, not Catholics) shouldn’t be consumed by anyone or anything, other than a goat perhaps, but there are people who won’t touch a banana if there’s the merest hint of brown on the skin. On the skin! Now I don’t profess to be an expert on fruit – to paraphrase The Killers, I like plums but I’m not a plumber – but one thing I do know is that you should never judge a banana by the cover.
So what’s all this got to do with intercostals? Plumbing, that’s what. For the most part of this week I’ve been suffering regular bouts of agony due to a freak plumbing injury that resulted in something horrible happening to one or more of my intercostal muscles.
If you’ve never had reason to look up what intercostal muscles are – and I sincerely hope you never do – they’re the muscles that hold your rib cage together and provide some assistance to the movement of the chest wall. Until you’ve pulled one, you would have no idea just how much your chest wall moves, or in what circumstances. According to healthline.com, ‘The pain will get worse when you twist, stretch, breathe in deeply, cough, or sneeze.’ It turns out I do all these things at least 20 times a day. And I can add to that list ‘laugh, lie down, stand up, put your socks on, take your socks off, stroke a cat and ride gently over speed bumps on a Honda Dylan’.
Intercostal muscles are so called because the Latin name for a rib was ‘costa’. Think about that next time you order your skinny latte. In fact, the literal translation of Diego Costa is actually ‘dig in the ribs’, believe it or not. From that definition evolved the French côte, meaning flank or side, and this was then adapted to mean coast. You could describe Coventry as ‘intercostal’, but few people ever do.
Why these pesky little muscles have to cause such excruciating pain is not explained. But there’s sod all you can do about it. Intercostal muscle strain is one of those apparently ‘untreatable’ injuries, like a broken toe or a scalded tongue, that you just have to ride out – ideally not on a Honda Dylan. You can try wrapping yourself in bubblewrap and zorbing everywhere but it doesn’t help because the worst pain comes from within.
So how do you protect yourself from intercostal agony? Again we turn to healthline.com (other online self-diagnosis sites are available, by the way). ‘Activities that may cause you to strain these rib muscles include: reaching, like when painting a ceiling; lifting while twisting; chopping wood; coughing or sneezing; participating in sports like rowing, golf, tennis, or baseball; falling; and being hit in the ribcage, like in a car accident or during contact sports.’
I can now add to that ‘trying to extract a short length of pipe from a Hep2o pushfit joint while scrabbling under the bathroom floor’.
So avoid all those things if you know what’s good for you, along with politics, religion and any provocative talk about bananas.
