Annie Lennox in recovery after operation

Annie Lennox has compared her foot to a dead fish, and not in a good way. The former Eurythmics singer has had an operation on her spine, and though she is now recovering in London, there's something fishy about her left limb.

"[It's] like a dead fish," she wrote on her blog, "freezing and numb. I'm going to have to get myself a crutch and a parrot, so I can fob myself off as a pirate and scare the neighbourhood preschoolers!"

Lennox was in Mexico for the International Aids Conference when a back spasm forced her to leave early, flying back to Britain for surgery. It was, she wrote, "more pain than I've ever experienced in my life". The 53-year-old was wheeled from her airplane, prompting her to write that she "felt a bit like Elizabeth Taylor".

Surgery went smoothly to release an impinged nerve, and Lennox is now recovering at home. Other than her numb left foot, her only complaint seems to be the endless Olympics coverage. "I can't stand sport," she wrote on her blog earlier this week. "I'm avoiding the Olympics like the plague."

Lennox's medical troubles have postponed the release of The Annie Lennox Collection, a compilation originally due in November. "Some of my plans and schemes have had to be put on hold, because there's not much I can do if I can't walk properly," she wrote. That album includes a new song, Pattern of My Life, written by Keane's Tom Chaplin.

Maybe Lennox could record a fishy pirate remix.