Dreadful Nonsense

Following a long application of some frozen peas and the giddy, heady feeling that personal injury can give to a lady, I decided that limping bravely down to the pub would be the best approach for everyone involved in my catastrophic injury prone lifestyle. I wasn’t too concerned with the colour of the toe involved - I bruise incredibly easily, like a peach in one half of an abusive relationship - and I expected everything to be a bit blue for a while.

What I didn’t expect was everyone else’s insistence that the toe was broken. “I thought it would be broken,” He Who Only… mused later that night, as we sat on our sofa gazing at the toe. “Are you sure it’s not broken?” my Mum asked down the phone. “That sounds like it’s broken,” my Dad advised from the background. “It’s probably broken,” everyone at work said the next day, as I hobbled about with no shoe on one foot.

Caving into the pressure of it all, I headed to A&E on Monday evening to see if it was broken. A man sitting in front of me had severed the tip of his finger, and I watched with gorey fascination to see if it would drop off as the nurse fiddled with it. Another lady to the left of me wasn’t able to stand up straight, and was walking about at an almost perfect 90 degree angle. Some policeman walked up and down with people in tow, and I considered again the wiseness of my decision to move to Hackney. When a man came in clutching his jaw and bleeding all down his front, I thought maybe my little blue toe might not be too lethal after all, but then the nurse arrived and took me through the back.

“That’s definitely broken,” Dr Sam said to me, moments after examining my foot and pressing hard on all the blue areas to see how far I jumped each time. “Tenderness in that area, along with the open cuts, points to a break. We’ll have it x-rayed just to be sure.”

Thank god for that, I thought, because having sat for 15 minutes watching a man with an incredibly bad burn covering the entirety of his right hand moan in pain made me feel like a bit of a fraud with my slight limp and a bit of a bruise. I was wheeled down to x-ray by a man called Dave (who had once also dropped a shelf near his foot, but thankfully, he told me, missed. That, he thought, would have been very painful indeed. I nodded sagely.) Foot well and truly rayed, I returned to A&E and waited for results.

No break. Nothing. Dr Sam even checked with another doctor, so convinced was she that the foot should be broken. She seemed a bit disappointed when she broke the news to me.

They strapped my toe, handed me some crutches, and told me to avoid falling furniture in the near future. I was then free to go.

To Be Continued…

This entry was posted on 04 April 2006 at 6:05 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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