Housekeeper’s Knee

Well now, one minute you are climbing out the shower minding your own business and the next the bathmat has scarpered and you have nearly split yourself in two with one leg in the bath and the other halfway across the bathroom with only a cold sweat and a screeching pain in the knee to show for it.

Readers, I have done myself a damage and honestly damaging yourself in the age of Covid is no hobble in the park because once you are carted off to hospital, it seems one must be left on the doorstep of A and E like a sack of spuds in the hope that a kindly passer by will offer you the wheelchair you need long enough to peel yourself off the doorframe and deliver yourself to triage.

Once inside you will discover a ghost town. A derth of the walking well and where once turning up with so much as a scratch meant being subjected to a barrage of tests for everything from blood pressure to a propensity for too many donuts, now you will be looked at sympathetically, offered two paracetamol and ushered into another wheelchair, that shall thereafter be pushed by a silent woman in white, to a large room where you will be abandoned to a silence so disconcerting you will not hear a doctor in a rainbow hat creep up behind you and lay two hands on your muddled shoulders. At which point you will shriek and he will giggle and a pantomine of profanity shall ensue.

The giggly doctor takes enormous pleasure from your utter failure to lift your sad leg off the bed you almost had to be winched on to, and you apologise every time you swear like the worst kind of fishwife. The nurses chuckle at your dramatics and the doctor tells you to go right ahead and swear as much as you need to, because in his words, ligament injuries of this kind are “an absolute b**tard”, but because of Covid, neither the physio department, who could do proper stress tests, nor the scanning department who could determine the extent of your injury are currently open and would you mind awfully, managing for the ten days it will be until you can be seen? And by managing, we mean, getting into bed, and existing, high as a kite on berserk painkillers with your foot in the air and a sock stuffed into your swearing gob for the duration?

Heavens to Betsey, this life is all two steps forward and three crutched steps backwards isn’t it? Five days later and I have abandoned the tablets because no-one wants to be a gibbering, constipated wreck for any longer than is absolutely necessary, and it turns out that me and crutches aren’t set to be mates for life either, after I stood up rather proudly holding them and without further ado lurched into the front window and nearly added a smashed nose to my current list of ailments. Of which peri-menopausal nipples are set to be the death of me, but we shall say no more of that.

So I have sat still for days on end. Having to ask for everything from a glass of water to a hanky for my runny nose, and enduring the humiliation of my families not unsympathetic mirth when I try to bear my not unsubstantial weight long enough to visit the powder room, without sounding, as Finn described it, as if I am giving birth to a baby elephant.

It is not fun. I slept through the first three days, surviving on sourdough crumpets and tropicana, and promptly falling back into the kind of bonkers dreams that had me waking convinced that Ste should be Jonathan Ross and all was not well the world.

Even though it plainly is: the house is immaculate. Ste and Finn are darlings without nurse’s uniforms and now that I am emerging out of my opiate fog in favour of ibuprofen and CBD oil, I have finally been allowed my confiscated laptop back for a few hours after Sergeant Major Ste decided that a few hours setting my online world too rights, probably wouldn’t kill me now I’m not talking gibberish or believing him to be an errant chat show host.

So umm yes. I haven’t fallen off the side of the earth, I simply fell out the shower and apparently did something drastic to my anterior cruciate ligament. So that’s nice. One expects such shenanigans from premier league footballers, not showering housewives, doesn’t one?

Anyways, I will meet you back here when I get my marbles back because I’m not sure I can be trusted to be sensible yet. The proof might just be in all the paragraphs above.

Have a wonderful, safe, weekend now won’t you?