A World of Good
Created | Updated Apr 11, 2010
It was, I think the 28th of December, and it was due to be my first day back at work. Oddly enough, I had woken up earlier that morning and heard a story on the radio about how cutting down on white wine was supposed to reduce your risk of getting bowel cancer. Or something. I thought to myself 'there's an article in this' and composed the outline of it as I fell asleep again. Had things worked out differently, you might be reading that instead, but they didn't, so you're not.
This was to be only my second ever sporting injury. My first was from about eight years ago, when I jumped out of my seat to celebrate Jason Robinson scoring a try against France at Twickenham and scraped my leg quite badly on the chair in front of me. This time it was to be football related and was in fact an injury to my foot. The problem was, that I had recorded the football highlights from late the previous evening and wanted to get them watched before I got into work and risked someone making a passing remark about a game I had not yet seen. I hate watching football when I know the result, it ruins it for me. So I had a plan: up at seven, quick shower, race through the kitchen grabbing my breakfast on the way and be in the front room by ten past so that I could get the whole thing watched while I dressed and ate my breakfast, and just have time to brush my teeth before I dashed out of the door. As I was showering, I had another brilliant idea. I could save time by drying myself off in the lounge. I could also afford myself the luxury of drying in a room that was actually warm, rather than one we used to keep drinks in to keep them cold. So I dashed through the kitchen on my wet feet and into our hall with its lovely terracotta tiling, and my feet slipped out from under me and I landed on my arse. What I also did, although I was not desperately conscious of it at the time, was slam my left foot so hard into our skirting board that my wife later had to spend half an hour extracting a piece of my toenail from it. I hobbled into the lounge and wrapped a piece of kitchen towel around my bleeding toe, fully intending to have my breakfast and move on with my day. My wife, however, had been roused by the noise of my crash and emerged from the bedroom to see if I was alright. I thought I was. She took one look at my toe and decided otherwise.
Now I must say that she has some degree of expertise in this area. As a trained care assistant she had a sound theoretical training, and as a person with a serious health condition she has been to enough different hospital departments to merit some sort of badge. Where my health is concerned, I always do what she says. So we phoned NHS direct 1 who were concerned about the blood under my toenail and the lack of sensation on the tip and told us to go to Accident and Emergency. Over the phone I could hear the nurse talking to my wife about a possible fracture and how they may have to remove my toenail. She refused to give me any details, saying only 'you don't want to know'.
Up at the hospital I was quickly having an X-ray and then invited to sit and wait for about four hours for someone to come and tell me what it said. AE waiting rooms are, as I'm sure anyone who has spent any time in them at all will tell you, no fun at all. There is, behind me, an old lady wittering incessantly. My wife tells me that the old lady is frightened. Later on we discover that she is very deaf and rather senile, and that the privacy of her consultation is made rather redundant by the need of the doctor to say everything to her VERY LOUDLY so that she can here it. Sadly, what she hears, she does not seem to understand.
The waiting room has, in common with most medical waiting rooms of my experience, an array of posters telling you about exciting ways of getting ill or causing yourself severe injury. These are all very important of course, but I've never been ill or injured and felt remotely like reading (much less remembering) a poster about the symptoms of Hepatitis which I should be on the lookout for. It also adds to the place a generally depressing air, and serves only to remind you of what a generally dangerous and unhealthy place the world is, as if trying to cure all ills by turning us into a nation of paranoid recluses who hide indoors all day for fear of getting a brain haemorrhage tripping over a brick, or catching syphilis from a puddle. If it were left to me, I would tear down all the posters and bind them all together in a free booklet for the walking wounded to take away and read at their leisure during their recuperation. I would paint the walls a nice friendly colour and I would put up posters advertising fun, healthy outdoor things to do and lovely food you could eat that would be good for you, rather than trying to terrify people into health. I would also take away the bloody vending machines. Everyone knows perfectly well that you shouldn't eat before you go into hospital in case you have to have surgery. The result of this is that, if you are being sensible, you are taunted by an array of brightly lit yorkie bars and Ginster's pasties. I'm not even sure if I like Ginster's pasties, but the hungrier you get, the more enticing a prospect they become, and the crueller it seems that the one thing in the entire damn room that is presenting to look remotely appealing is the one thing you can't have, apart from the doctors of course, who are kept well away from patients for health reasons.
Finally I was ushered through one of the doors to see a doctor. The doors are slightly ominous, in that there are three or four of them, narrowly spaced, into which people disappear and are often never seen again. The reason for this is that they are all doors into the same room, which is divided into small cubicles by a series of wheeled curtain affairs. The partitions are all centred around the main area, where doctors gather around computers peering earnestly at the screen in the way that I would do if I was hoping that staring for a long time at a problem for which I had no obvious solution might suddenly produce one out of thin air. I hope I have misread this expression because it is not a diagnostic approach which especially appeals to me. In due course a young, blond south African sounding woman approaches and explains that she is the doctor. There is some small irony, it occurs to me, in the only white doctor I have seen all day being south African. My toe is not damaged, it seems, and the doctors generally prefer to leave the old nail in place because it acts as a splint for new nail growth. I am, thank god, spared any outpatient surgery. I can go home, take the day off (I must keep my foot up for at least 72 hours- this is practically the ideal injury!) and watch the football at my leisure, even rewinding bits and watching them again if I wish. Two years ago, I was off for a week following surgery on my nose. Last year I got a week of after I had a vasectomy (a story for another time, perhaps). This year, after much experimentation, I have found the perfect solution to a pressing need for a day of sick. On reflection, I think this is what I would put on the walls of my Accident and Emergency waiting room. A couple of days of sick once in a while would do us all the world of good.
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