The Fall

Fifteen minutes earlier we’d been admiring the heritage streetscapes of Millthorpe and enjoying coffee and cake in a trendy café.

Sporting my new Middlemost coat and oblivious to what lies ahead in Millthorpe

Then, just one step. One misstep. That’s all it took! Does it happen in slow mo? It definitely absorbs your attention. Descending and landing. HARD. On the floor for far longer than you’re airborne. Then leg buckled under heavy body. Gyrating like a semi turned turtle. Gasping in pain. Lots of hands and lower limbs come into view as people crouch down offering aid. The shop proprietor has to go next door to get a cup of water. Water is a panacea. I gulp down my arthritis meds and take deep breaths between sips. There are ‘Mind the Step’ signs pinned up and fluoro tape edging on the floor apparently; I saw neither. I was chatting to my husband and the owner about a scarf we were buying. I reached out to touch some garments on a stand and fell in a split second. 

The fateful scene (well just adjacent to the fateful scene)

Adrenaline lets me exchange pleasantries with the people who gather around me and I somehow manage to sit upright on the rogue step. A woman says ‘it is dangerous, it isn’t obvious’ and her husband says ‘there’s signs and tape that’s what you’re supposed to do’. The shop owner laments the uneven floors of old buildings. ‘You do need to do something’ says the first woman. An Irish guy wearing a tweed sports jacket with toning scarf asks if there’s anything he can do to help. There isn’t. Then he compliments my husband who is now swathed in the new scarf, on being ‘nattily’ dressed. The proprietor takes my name and phone number. I don’t think to get anyone’s.

Somehow I stumble without yelping audibly to the wooden bench outside the shop and wait while my husband goes to get the car. He’s been assured it is okay to double park. The streets are hardly busy. He returns and I hobble into the passenger seat. My leg and ankle feel like something is ripped. I ring our lunch hosts and leave a pitiful message about having fallen and needing to get to Emergency. 

Triage, Orange Hospital

We drive the 15 minutes to Orange hospital. The staff bring me a wheelchair and fast track me to triage where the kindly nurse with a spectacular inked moth at her throat asks me if I’d heard a ’crack’. I say I didn’t but the impact was undeniable. I hand over my Medicare card. For some reason the medical practice I have been attending for 10 years doesn’t present itself on the hospital’s system three hundred kilometres from home. I give them the number from my phone contacts. They let me keep the wheelchair and bring me an ice pack for my now elephantine ankle. 

Three quick X-rays and the wait begins. Jury finalisation for Trump’s trial is on the small TV screen suspended from the ceiling. The reporter says it has been hard to find anyone without strong preconceived views. I exchange superficial remarks with a thin woman cradling her wrist. ‘I fell off my bike yesterday evening’ she says. ‘I slept with my wrist like this’ she gestures holding it gently to her chest. It is mid-morning and the waiting room is almost empty. That changes over the next three hours as more injured and unwell trickle in. 

Self explanatory

A woman whose name is almost a homophone of mine gets called and I optimistically ask to be wheeled up. Our lunch host returns my call. ‘We’ve just eaten the lasagne and the apple crumble and feel guilty’ he says and wishes me a speedy recovery.

In the consult room the lanky red headed registrar asks me to recount what happened. I do, concluding on the note that I hope it is just a sprain. ’It is broken’ he counters and shows me the image of my fibula with its clean horizontal fracture. He tells us where there is a coffee cart for my husband to get us drinks while we wait for an orthopaedic surgeon to give a ruling. They’re operating so it will be a while. I get chatting to the thin cyclist with what does turn out to be a broken wrist who is waiting to get it set. She is depressed about her general health and talks fatalistically about the future. She doesn’t have a phone so we send her boyfriend a text giving him an update on her progress. The lanky registrar returns and catches my husband trying to look at my x-rays on the laptop and chides him. ‘It’s a breach’ he says as he might see other patients’ records. I apologise and he is cordial. We develop a rapport as I tell him we’re in town to see a show that evening and comment on his striking colouring. He says he’s used to it, that strangers would come up to him and ruffle his hair when he was a kid. 

There’s another hiatus. A nurse checks my blood pressure (still a little elevated) and temperature (normal) again and I drink my take away tea. I brave the unisex accessible toilet relying on my husband to direct the wheelchair to both the loo and the hand basin. That occupies a good ten minutes. Eventually the Registrar comes back and says he’s shown my x-rays to one of the orthopaedic team now. They’ve given the go ahead for me to be fitted with a cam boot and crutches and to be discharged. I learn that he originally trained as a physiotherapist but found the work dull. I remark that he must certainly now get variety in ER. He enjoys it he says. He chooses a medium cam boot and adjusts the crutches to my height then drills me on how to walk with them. I am allowed to place some weight on the foot. ‘Bad foot, crutches, good foot, bad foot, crutches, good foot’ I repeat the mantra out loud and he watches me take a turn about the corridor.

It’s a Saturday and no-one at the hospital back home can take a referral so I need a hard copy discharge letter and treatment plan. While we’re waiting for them the bike rider and I introduce one another properly and chat a bit more agreeing it has been nice to keep company on and off for four hours. I ask my husband to take our photo which we send to her boyfriend and post on Facebook dubbing ourselves ‘The Fracture Sisters’. 

The Fracture Sisters

We leave with the paperwork and a prescription for some strong pain killers which we get filled en route to the guest house. The adrenaline carries me through enough to joke with our hosts who are most solicitous bringing me a footstool and another ice pack. They recount their own experiences with fractures on holidays – a smashed sacrum from falling off a trail bike and a shattered wrist sustained while tugging at potential firewood. My story – tripped while shopping – feels distinctly bourgeois in comparison. 

Although I have missed two thirds of historic Millthorpe and lunch with our friends I have been treated royally by hospital staff and our hosts and had a few laughs with the other ER patients. I will rest now and be able to go to the theatre this evening.