Spare Ribs

So  I fell down the stairs and cracked a couple of ribs…

What? You want to know more? You crazy maniac.

Yesterday I spent the day cleaning and polishing my home. Afterwards it smelled like a fresh rose in a perfumier’s arse. So after all this frenetic activity I had a nice hot bath, climbed into bed and fell asleep.

Now to say that I’m a light sleeper would be an understatement. A mouse has only to fart a mile away and I’m wide awake. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to the casual reader of this blog, that I should be woken by people whispering outside my front door or even that the movement of the door handle would send me bolting from my bed to investigate what could only be an attempt to burgle my little house.

So I did just that and at 4am while in the nip, I leapt from my bed and ran to the stop of the stairs. Now at this point I intended to walk down the stairs, switch on

the living room light and shout expletives through the front door. However what actually happened was: I grabbed the banister at the top of the stairs enacted a brilliant pirouette, body slammed the staircase and sledded down it back down and head first before coming to rest on my doormat.

For a few seconds I lay in a heap, working through my accident checklist:

Is my neck broken? No.

Is my back broken? No.

Was I knocked out? No.

Am I dead? No.

Then I listened and from the other side of the door I heard a man and women having a heated argument about a shed. Yes, a fucking shed! So, using  the last bit of breath in my winded cadaver I shouted the wittiest thing ever. What I said was, now get this, “why don’t you two cunts just fuck off?” Roll over Oscar, there’s a new wit in town.

So after a job well done I headed back to bed, I was obviously OK, right?

Wrong!

As I lay in bed, one thing became clear. Things hurt, not just a bit, a lot. So (more slowly this time) I got out bed, put on some clothes and took a taxi to the hospital.

Now I don’t know if it’s the recession but the place was rammed with drunk and depressed people. There were cut wrists, overdoses, alcoholic poisonings and quite a few broken jaws. Though I would imagine that they were accidents or as result of a drunken fight, rather than a cry for help. Then, you never know, somewhere in this town may be a note on a kitchen table, saying “I can’t take it anymore, my only option is to punch my own jaw off. Goodbye cruel mandible!” Did I tell you that I’m writing this while high on pain killers?

So, after an hour of being entertained by the dispossessed, desperate and future Lembit Opik look-alikes, a nurse took my arm and led me into a cubicle, for a few minutes it was fun, I cracked a few jokes and she roared with laughter. This stopped instantly, when a severely fatigued doctor walked in and prodded me until I squealed.

“Are you Martin Wolfenden?”

“Yes,” I said defensively.

“So, we meet again,” she said with a smile, which made me feel like James Bond in the grip of an arch enemy. I imagined myself strapped to a table having my knackers split in two with a laser. Then the penny dropped: this was the doctor, who’d stuck her finger up my bum.

“Oh it’s you, how have you been keeping?” Was the only thing I could think of saying. After all we’d shared an intimate moment, so it would have been rude not to ask..

She just looked be up and down for a few minutes before saying “Fine, we need to get you to X-Ray.”

So, thence I was bourn (in an NHS wheelchair) to wait another hour, in another waiting room. Though in this room, everybody had their jaw, even if they did exhibit a fascinating array of mangled limbs. One man told me that he had tried to ride a shopping trolley down a hill and crashed into a Police car. The police were waiting outside to give him a ‘caution’ or some such thing and he was worried about his job as a school teacher. It seems a pity for a man to lose his livelihood, over a silly drunken stunt.

Anyway after being zapped with radiation and not turning into a super hero (what a swizz), I was taken to another waiting room. The school teacher who I had spoken to earlier was there but this time he was grinning. Apparently the police had told him off but he wouldn’t have a criminal record, so his job was safe. Though, he was unsure how to explain the broken arm to his colleagues, so I suggested that he make up something heroic.

By this time I could see that it was daylight outside so I texted my boss to tell him that I was going to be late. I’d been in the hospital for five hours by the time a nurse shouted my name out and I was escorted into a side office where my ribcage was floating on a computer screen. The doctor who I’d seen earlier walked in with a cup of coffee and a thousand yard stare. She looked through me for a while, then at the floor and then at the computer screen which she studied for a few minutes in silence before using the mouse to zoom in to a bit of the image, and here they were; two small lines, one about the width of a hair and the other a piece of string.

Nothing of note happened after that. I was told to rest my shoulder because I’d pulled some muscles, and somebody gave me a prescription for some painkillers. Within an hour and a half of leaving the hospital I was at work, slightly high on pain killers and fighting to stay awake. Just another day in the shit sit-com life of Martin Wolfenden.

Time for a hot bath I think.

Ow!