| Not happy |
[Apr. 22nd, 2003|03:30 pm] |
| [ | Feeling |
| | grumpy | ] |
| [ | Reading |
| | Nothing at the moment | ] |
I had a really good Easter. It just went wrong in the final few minutes when I ended up in casualty with a broken foot.
We went up to Altrincham to visit my "new" family - the mother wot bore me, as opposed to the mother wot raised me (regular readers will remember I'm adopted and have traced my birth mother). This is always fun, and I'm not just saying that because they read this journal. *waves hello*
I like the collective sense of humour they all seem to have, I like the new feeling of being part of a large family (the one I grew up in is small and intimate), and I still can't get over being in a room with people who look like me. They'll never replace or dislodge the family I grew up in and whose name I bear, but they wouldn't want that. I've been extremely lucky to be welcomed by them in the way that I have and value their friendship. Although I still can't get my head round what relation I am to Emily Grace.
(Oh, and watch this space in June for more details of a very worthwhile charity project that my step-sister Jo is doing.)
Anyway, enough of the serious stuff. Normal service will be resumed before certain people start leaving sarcastic messages and certain other people start egging them on.
We were dead lucky with traffic on the way up, breezing past road works and not getting held up at all in the car-sucking swamp that is Birmingham. The only delays came at motorway service stations where the usual collection of morons had been let out for the day to work on the tills. Surely even in the Midlands they shouldn't need to go and fetch their supervisor in order to be told what a croissant is? I mean, they sell the things so they ought to know. It's not as if I'd brought it in with me from some pretentious overpriced restaurant in Farringdon and asked them to identify it and suggest a price, like some kind of culinary Antiques Roadshow. *sigh*
The return home was a little more bloody but we evaded the worst of the football crowds (sodding Ipswich - you'd think they didn't want to get promoted) and only had to deal with low-grade stupidity in the services. In retrospect I suppose it wasn't a smart move to go into a Burger King wearing a shirt emblazoned with McDonald's sponsorship. Once home we were faced with a mattress and a box of bits of pine laughably maskerading as a futon. We'd bought it on Friday morning before setting off and were determined to assemble it Monday night.
By 11.30pm the bits of pine had become a frame, the mattress was in place, and I was heading towards the front door with an armful of packaging to take to the bins when I turned my right ankle.
I do this a lot. Usually it hurts, I curse fluently, and everything's back to normal after five minutes. This time there was a loud 'crack'. Over the next few minutes I did all the classic shock stuff - blacking out briefly, throwing up, collapsing on the newly-constructed futon and issuing instructions which made no sense - and Lisa got me to casualty barefoot, with a lump on the side of my foot the size of my nose. Which is to say, it was big lump.
A doctor prodded it, decided it was probably ligaments but could be a break, and said I needed an X-ray (I could have told him that bit). Unfortunately, they weren't doing X-rays that night so I'd have to come back today. I wasn't hugely impressed by this - it's an A&E department, how can they not be doing X-rays? We came home, finally ate the curry we were supposed to have in Altrincham, and Lisa went to bed at about 2am while I found ![[info]](http://www.deadjournal.com:8080/userinfo.gif) bluegutterfrog on AIM who told me fearsome stories of foot injuries and toes turning strange colours. Thanks Audrey...
So we returned to the hospital this morning and while Lisa parked and did some shopping I went back to A&E for the X-ray. Except the machine was broken, so they directed me to the proper X-ray department half way across the hospital and I hobbled there cursing under my breath. The X-ray nurses were more sympathetic and when the X-ray was done and I had my prints they found a porter who pushed me back in a wheelchair. A jovial doctor called Sandy told me the bad news was that the foot is broken, while the good news was "you don't need me, and I don't need you". The break is actually better news than it sounds, because it should heal cleanly and without further attention, whereas tendon / ligament / muscle damage could have been slow and complicated (just ask Zowie).
So, no plaster, no crutches, no painkillers. They can't do anything to speed up the healing, but equally I can't do anything to slow it down. This means I'm cleared to return to work (and drive and so on) as soon as the foot will bear my weight without me howling. I'm going to rest it tomorrow and see how Thursday looks.
And right now I'm sitting at home, glad of the day off but in a grump at the pain and the lost earnings... |
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