My doc gave me a clean bill of health today. Four weeks of being careful, he assured me, will mean I'll be well able to climb Mont Blanc in September.

I immediately transferred the sum required to get me on a group expedition in mid-September. Hefty. It'd want to be - I've been saving for this for the last eighteen months. I joined a gym and started training pretty hard in January, single minded in my determination to complete this task.

So that Sunday almost four weeks ago, when I was lying on a bench beside the football pitch with my ankle the size of a tennis ball, the tears I was shedding had nothing to do with the physical pain I was in. I really thought I wasn't going to make it - all the saving, all the sacrifices rendered to nothing because of an incident that happened so fast I can't even replay it in my head.

I missed my warm-up trip to the Tatra mountains in southern Poland, where Poland's highest peak had been scheduled to be conquered by my intrepid climbing buddy and I. So frustrated with everyone and everything, myself above all.

Anyway, now it's on. I am grateful for the injury now. Now I know how much I want this. I know how much this means to me. It's an oft-preached banality, but we take the small things in life incredibly for granted. How easy it is to forget that something as utterly simple as climbing up as steep slope for a week can make one as happy as it is possible to be. I know, for me, that that is the pinnacle (yes, intended) of happiness.

I'll be at the top of Europe on September 18th. What to do then? I expect a mid-life crisis for a few months, until I have set the next expedition.