On April 2nd 1982, I lay on the snow in a surprising amount of my own blood, smoking a calming Marlboro and waiting for an ambulance.
32 stitches later, I was discharged from hospital into a world that decided that, because I was a soldier, I had probably been doing something heroic in the Falklands or South Georgia, whose conflicts had just started. The prosaic truth was that I had been skiing in Val d’Isere with two friends, and had sliced my right ski through my left knee. So arguably not that heroic.
Every man knows that good, marketable, male injuries need three things: strong physical evidence, a slight inference of lasting damage and, above all, a compelling perceived back story. Get all those together, and the floor is yours.
Annoyingly, I have just injured myself severely again. I say ‘annoyingly’, as it seems that I am not the only health story round these parts at the moment: Haslemere (‘twinned with Wuhan’ as some wag has inscribed on the signpost) has brought the new corona virus within eight miles of our village. And I say ‘severely’ because, if you were in my position, it would seem severe.
Clinically, the diagnosis is that I have dislocated, and then relocated, my thumb. Thank you, you are too kind.
But if you go back to those three preconditions for a ‘good’ injury, you will see where my problem lies.
First, it doesn’t look earth-shakingly impressive. A tiny bit swollen, maybe, with a tinge of bruising stretching from the web, around the base of the thumb to its heel. It is crying out for a bandage, a sling even, but it has none. It is just a valiant and anonymous adjunct to my life, much like my six iron, our fondue set and, before Trevor says it, my wallet.
Secondly, even I understand that this one is probably not life-changing. For a start, it is on my left hand, and I am unbelievably right-handed; I mean so right-handed that I can’t even use the left one to stir the contents of saucepans with, or fake a child’s writing on the envelope of a greetings card. Secondly, it is getting better already, long before the world around me has come to appreciate it. Like a dusting of dawn snow in Hyde Park, it is melting away before the world around it has woken up to its significance.
Finally, it lacks the heroic back story. Even I would admit that. If I was a proud man, I would insist that it had been incurred fighting off some mugger in Petworth, or lifting the tonnage of a car off a cat that it has just run over. But that is not what happened. No, what happened is that I was sleeping on it, in that it appears to have been under the dead weight of the left side of my body when I rolled over to the right in my sleep. And it stayed there, the thumb, not the body. And 86 kg or so of kinetic energy pulled the arm over, but not the thumb, which stayed where it was under my, well, under the middle bit of the back of my body, the bit with its own apparent gravitational pull. Work it out for yourself; all you need to know is that there was a small crack, a surge of extraordinary pain and then me sitting bolt upright, swearing. Caroline thought I was having a nightmare, said ‘are you OK?’ but was fast asleep again before I could answer.
And so I suffer on in silence. A bit, but not a lot, like Charles I walking out to the scaffold, I and my thumb are yesterday’s news.
Meanwhile, we all have our pride to think of.
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