"I'm 20 years old, a professional athlete, should be in the prime of my life and I can't even put my socks on."
Nick Griggs recalls a period he admits frightened him, but one he is emerging from after resuming running over the last fortnight. It will be some weeks, however, before he is able to do a full training load.
The last time most of us saw the precocious Tyrone talent, he was running his way on 8 December to a brilliant silver medal in the under-23 race at the European Cross Championships in Antalya.
However, the best medical guess is that the knee infection which soon was preventing the Ireland athlete from even bending his right leg began that very day in Turkey after he was pushed to the ground on a congested startline.
Griggs, who burst into Irish athletics consciousness in 2021 by winning the European Under-20 3,000m title as a 16-year-old, describes his subsequent torment by mid-January when the pain was such that he had to ask his father to drive him from their home in Newmills to Belfast and back so that he could get yet another scan.
"I feel like I'm a tough person mentally but it has been challenging. The worst bit was when it did get better and I thinking 'class, I'm getting better' to literally that Tuesday night where I couldn't drive myself to my scan and my dad had to drive me," Griggs told BBC Sport NI of that particularly difficult day.
"I just sat in my room, staring at my Xbox. It had been almost three or four weeks since I had been able to do any training and it had just gotten worse. I was thinking 'what the hell is wrong with me? I'm in pain sitting here and I can't bend my leg'."
'It felt like it was in the bone'
Now that he's coming out the other side of a "pretty grim" period, with him set to join his regular training partners in coach Mark Kirk's group of athletes travelling to the Pyrenees next week, Griggs is able to look back at what happened in Antalya.
"The gun went and I took one or two steps and I was feeling two hands on my shoulders which literally pushed me to the floor," added the Tyrone man, who was up near the front because his previous medal exploits at the event meant he was among the elite performers being introduced to the spectators.
"I got up and kept running and finished [second] and then about an hour later, I was in my cool down [run] and I said to Callum [Morgan] my team-mate and regular training partner, 'my knee is really, really sore. I don't know what that is'.
"It felt like it was in the bone...I remember thinking that to myself."
But there was a medal ceremony to do and he wasn't the only Irish athlete who limped his way back to the hotel with Cormac Dixon having got spiked.
"A few people said you got spiked. It might swell up a bit but in a week you'll be fine.
"I kept training for probably three weeks. Three full training weeks of probably 85 to 90 miles or whatever I was doing at the time but it just got to a point where I literally couldn't run any more."
Amid scans which didn't diagnose why there was a fluid build-up in Griggs' right knee, ice and compression treatment at the Sport Institute of Northern Ireland did initially appear to work in the first half of January.
However, a sudden deterioration soon left the middle-distance athlete effectively back at square one.
"The fluid had meant the range of movement was gone, I couldn't run, couldn't cycle, couldn't do anything but ...
