Amig@s! I’ve not blogged for a while, the reason being that I’ve been in residence in my wife’s delightful home town of Grodków where NASA send astronauts to adjust to life in an atmosphere free environment, and wherein I only write when the mood takes me… which is becoming as rare an occurrence as days when I have no pain in my feet.
However, my writing torpor was recently kick-started by some very good news. I have been offered a contract by a relatively new but highly respected publisher, Chilelsbury Publishing not only to publish my early memoir, Sand in Strange Places, but to re-publish two of my other books, one of which is long out of print.
Happy days! All hands are on the keyboard deck to finish the post-development edit re-write and get it to Chiselbury by the end of the month.
So that’s my hands taken care of; not so my feet, to which I alluded earlier.
A couple of weeks ago, I managed to strain my right Achilles. The incident lacked drama, and I can’t even remember how I did it, but I awoke one morning to find that I couldn’t put any weight on it. Now, I know what you’re thinking: a pub-slash-drinking related incident, but this you’ll know — if you’ve read any of my Grodków related blogs — that this couldn’t be further from the truth, as there are no pubs in Grodków.
Perhaps it was an eiderdown-stroke duvet-adjusting injury? No, more than likely I slipped fairly innocuously when out walking in the wilds of suburban Grodków, and the slide started a strain which… as things do at my venerable age… won’t go away without a long goodbye.
It got so bad that I had to postpone my return to Marbella by a week, and to volunteer for an additional week in Grodków… well, at the risk of invoking the wrath of my lovely wife, it must have been bad, mustn’t it?
Back in Marbs, I decided to use my ridiculously expensive health insurance (which, due to their failure to pay for my nose operation in May, I will not be renewing) to have my ankle checked out, and received an appointment two days ago.
The doctor (traumatologist, as they’re referred to here) literally threw me face down onto a bed and proceeded to poke around at my heel, to my very great discomfort. But this was nothing compared to what was about to come. His English was probably only marginally better than my Spanish, and encumbered by his mask, not much of any consequence reached my ears. Until, that was, he mumbled something about cortisone, and proceeded — without further discussion, ado or debate — to inject me in the fashion of the Commodores song: [not] once, twice but three times… in the ankle.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a cortisone injection, but they are jolly painful. To have one needle inserted into an inflamed Achilles is bad enough, but for this to be repeated two further times… well, we must be talking levels of pain rivalling childbirth here.
He then encased the injured area with some form or elastic strapping which he referred to as “bands” and told me to dry them with a hairdryer after showering, and to leave them in place for three weeks. I’ve had two showers in the last twenty-four hours, and I’ll be lucky if they remain in place for three days.
The rest of the day was spent hobbling home from the clinic and resting with my foot up. I even had to cancel beers and a nosebag with my good friend Jeffry, such was my predicament.
I’m not a fan of cortisone and for very good reason: and I’m going to quote from Mr Google here: “Cortisone works by reducing inflammation and suppressing the immune system’s response to injury or disease. It can relieve pain, but it is not a cure.” Also, unless the good doctor is a darts expert and hits the exact spot with the accuracy of a sober Eric Bristow, it can cause significant damage to the surrounding soft tissue.
Let’s fast forward to yesterday morning.
It’s seven o’clock, I’ve managed around six hours sleep, but I’m still feeling groggy, due to the pain killers the good Dr Maskie prescribed. I decide to cancel my arrangements to watch Ireland attempt to thrash South Africa with some good Saffer amigos, and instead opt to have an easy day. No gym, no alcohol, no sausage rolls. So, I make a cup of tea and go back to bed.
It’s about ten now and I decide that I feel a little better, and a couple of strolls to the bathroom and the kitchen inform me that the pain in my Achilles… well, it’s pretty much gone, and on a whim I decide to cut my toenails to celebrate.
Now, many of my blogs — believe it or not — contain a salient nugget of advice which I have acquired over a very long time, in the manner that Liam Neeson picked up his special skills… you know, the ones that can make him an absolute nightmare for certain people.
And here is one which I am now going to share with you: Never… ever, consider cutting your toenails when you have taken painkillers accompanied by literature which advises you not to drive or operate machinery following ingestion.
And never, dear reader, make the mistake of considering nail scissors as anything other than potentially life-threatening machinery.
I trim the nails on my injured foot first without incident, and then turn my attention to my good foot, to find that I could finger pick my guitar with the nail on my big toe. But, to my horror, I don’t line up the scissors precisely enough with the target area, and in addition to slicing through the toe nail, I find that I have sliced through the top of my toe.
There’s blood everywhere.
It’s pumping from my toe, and within a minute the floor of the bathroom is looking like a murder scene.
I hobble into the kitchen to look for a first aid kit, leaving a lake of blood in my trail, and find I am hopelessly underprepared for such an eventuality.
It’s time to phone a friend, except the only friend I have in the area will still be sound asleep right now, and so I phone my emergency private insurance company, Helicopteros Sanitarios, and explain my predicament.
I try to imagine the lady at the other end of the phone trying to process my situation, in order to inform the medical team, which she will soon despatch:
“Yes… he was cutting his toenails when he slashed through his big toe… no, he didn’t sound particularly drunk… no, I don’t think the injury is life-threatening, but I did tell him to wrap his foot in a towel, elevate it and put his hand over his heart… no, he hasn’t called recently with similar nonsensical requests, but he has called for help regarding several similarly bizarre incidents… a badly bruised hip from a fall off a bicycle… a damaged knee from an undisclosed incident… and around five hundred other call outs for Man Flu.”
And so on.
Twenty minutes later the medical team arrive and I admit them, guiding them through the flood of blood on the living room floor. At the helm is a German doctor — who I’m familiar with, as he has attended one of my less dramatic callouts before. There are two male nurses… one may actually be the ambulance driver, but that’s an inconsequential detail. The nurse gets to work on my toe, and tuts a bit sympathetically having surveyed the extent of my injury. It’s clearly worse than he’d been expecting.
“This is going to hurt a little,” he says before plunging a sharp object into my toe, which I imagine will be the prelude to some form of stitching.
He’s right — it hurts, but it doesn’t hurt as much as Dr Maskie probing my Achilles with three cortisone embossed needles.
In the meantime, the German doctor sets about form filling, as he has nothing else to do, and enquires about the medication I’m currently taking. I can’t find the list on my phone, so I direct him to my medicine drawer-slash-cupboard, wherein he eventually finds the correct shoe box. One of the adjuncts of the aging process is that I’m now spending considerably more on medication and supplements than I am on alcohol. Unhappy days.
That task complete, he asks me for the second time (in addition to having been informed by the recipient of my call) how the accident occurred, and I can’t resist informing him that it was a suicide attempt and I thought that I’d start from the bottom and work my way upwards.
Naturally, being German, he takes this seriously, but the nurse who has now pretty much stemmed the flow of blood, finds it hilarious.
Ten minutes later, I have a fully bandaged toe, no further bleeding and the medical team have departed, leaving me to clean up the lake of blood in the living room, kitchen and the trail down the corridors from the blood-splattered bathroom.
Now, here’s a second salient fact: if you’ve ever seen one of those movies where the murderer dismembers a body and then spends about ten minutes cleaning up the blood… this is entirely fanciful.
Blood is one of the most difficult substances to clean up, and after being left to its own devices for around half an hour, my flooring looks like a painting that Picasso might have done whilst under the influence, had the art shop only stocked the colour red.
You’d think it would be simple to remove it from tiled and laminate flooring using a mop, but I can tell you it isn’t. Thirty minutes and a strenuous workout later, I’ve cleaned it up to my relative satisfaction, but I suspect my wife will find it everywhere with the acuity of a CSI investigator. And I can also inform you that my task wasn’t helped by having to hobble on the heel of one foot and the toes of the other, as I had over-optimised the redemption of my Achilles.
So, that’s pretty much all there is to tell.
Fast forward to this morning and my toe is still bandaged but showing no signs of further damage, and my Achilles is a little easier.
Consequently, I’m going to venture to the gym. What else could possibly go wrong?
Hasta pronto, Chic@s! Please like and share if the mood takes you. And make a note in your diaries to remind you to pick up a copy of Sand in Strange Places, available from September from Chislebury Publishing, Amazon and of course all good bookshops, which will save you scratching your heads over Christmas presents next year.