Ruben Nicolai is plagued by a mysterious ailment on his left arm. Doctors are puzzled: they continuously inject him with anti-inflammatories, but it doesn’t seem to work.
It has not been an easy decade for Ruben Nicolai. His night’s sleep is plagued by a mysterious ailment. “I haven’t slept on my left side for quite some time, years. I always have a little pain in my left arm, a tingling, and then I think: I’m having a heart attack,” he explains in the podcast Tijl Ruben Tijl.
Pain in arm
To avoid that potential heart attack, Ruben sleeps on his right side. “I then think: I will not lie on the left, because then it will all weigh on my heart. Well, it got much worse, those pains in my arm. I got more and more pain in that arm.”
Colleague Ruben van der Meer is stunned. “You told me this a while ago. And I was like, well, you’re going to go to the doctor and blah blah blah. But no, you went to lie on your other side. But in the meantime there is just more pain?!”
Nights awake
The pain has recently become so bad that it has driven Ruben insane. “I was in so much pain that I just woke up at night. I just woke up in the middle of the night. God, I was in so much pain in that arm, I spent all day… Just nagging pain. I was sleeping, but then I woke up in the middle of the night. So much pain in that arm.”
He continues: “So annoying. And then I just didn’t know how to put it down. And then I finally got up, because letting him dangle a bit was the best thing. Then it starts to tingle, as if your arm is sleeping.”
To the doctor
Finally, Ruben went to the doctor a few weeks ago. “I went to the doctor and he determined that it is an infection. And I’ve had it for over a year now. And it’s not a virus, not a bacteria. I got an injection. And there is narcotics in it.”
And now? “So now I have to turn it in circles, so that the stuff is evenly distributed. And that’s a pain reliever and it’s an anti-inflammatory.”
Two weeks
The injection will probably have to be repeated with Ruben. How is he doing now, two weeks later? “I now have two injections in it,” he says.
And, is he still in pain? Unfortunately. “Yes, sure, still.”
