disjointed

Yesterday I dislocated my finger. I tripped on a folded horse blanket and fell against the car and when I stood up my ring finger literally stuck out behind the pinky at a 45 degree angle. So scary and, during the hour and forty five minutes waiting for the ambulance, nauseatingly painful. The pain however only came in waves, in swells of sweating faintness. “She is grey,” I heard someone telling the ambulance despatch. But I could think and breathe and I just tried to stay calm and tried to keep my muscles and breathing relaxed. I was with a bunch of blokes in a huge storage hangar who would not let me drive myself to hospital but kept standing about telling me horror stories about their mates whose joints had never recovered. They had no help on offer and were useless in the way people often are when there’s any kind of emergency. “Could you please bring me a chair?” I said, when the first wave of faintness began, “I think I might pass out.” It was restorative to have to project manage, because it gave me something to think about and that really helped. The ambo turned up and sat me on the front seat of his car while he completed his paperless paperwork. He drove laconically with no hands on the wheel as he gestured and told me about his afternoon. I had worked out that my distorted hand looked totally gangsta and was holding it up, the fingers curling under and this new finger shooting out at an impossible angle, crowing, “Check it out! This is going to be my new gang sign.”

“You party trick,” he said, and my heart sank. “Well,” I said, “I hope not. I sincerely hope this will not be a lasting um, disfigurement.” In the emergency ward I was seen within minutes and a doctor injected the knuckle with four seeds of local anaesthetic to make the relocation bearable. Then the specialist on call came in his white coat to yank my finger back into its berth, a most horrid sensation. Now the long road of rehab begins so I can, I hope, play guitar again.

My mother who has a freshly broken hip had to drive out to rescue me from the hospital. When we got home at last, both pale and tired, the Greek woman who is living here to care for Dad baled me up in the kitchen to say, “Your cat – she knew, this morning, that you were about to have an accident, this is why she was mad at you! she didn’t want you to do it.” She said, “All day you work, all night you work. You are too tired. That is why, accident.” Her fury of caring broke my dry heart and I sat down and cried. “Why you cry?” Oh, I said, I’m just feeling sorry for myself. And the darling carer, who I think did not know the phrase ‘sorry for’, roused again. “Why? you are an excellent person. Why you should be sorry?”