Tom Fairhurst

The first time, I did almost everything wrong. I had a lower-back operation abroad, a discectomy, and I flew home eleven days later because that was when my ticket said to. Nobody had told me that recent surgery and a long flight are a bad combination for blood clots, so I spent six hours in a window seat, too sore to get up, quietly convinced every twinge in my calf was the end of me. It was not, but the fear was real and completely avoidable, and it came entirely from not knowing what I now know.

The second time was a knee, two years later, and I treated the journey as part of the treatment. I asked the surgeon exactly when I could fly rather than assuming. I got the letter. I wore the stockings, booked the aisle, walked the plane every hour, and told my insurer about the operation before I travelled instead of hoping it would not come up. It was calm and dull, which is what post-op travel should be.

TripKinetics is the difference between those two trips, written down. I am not a doctor and I am not selling you a clinic or a holiday. I am the person who got it wrong first so that the sequence, when to wait, what to declare, how to keep moving, is laid out plainly before you are the one in the window seat. Dr Helena Boyd, a rehabilitation-medicine consultant, checks the medical detail on every article; the trips, and the early mistakes, are mine.