I’m bad, ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, I’m bad.

I’m bad I’m bad, I’m really really bad.  Not, unfortunately in a good grab your crotch and stand on tiptoe kind of way, like M.Jackson, although to be fair, a glove was a necessity.

It is five or six weeks since I broke my arm, four since I had the hooks put in and what a very long four weeks of constant pain they have been.  Never having broken anything on such a scale before, I wasn’t sure how much it should hurt.

I did break my toe in Australia.  My husband stepped back on my little bare foot in his huge unyielding plastic beach shoes.  I knew it was broken at once.  We limped over to a hotel where I was fortified with a drink and strapped it to the toe next to it for moral support.  I took all the painkillers I could find but couldn’t stand up in the heels I had taken for the wedding two days later.  I wore them and sat down.  My main problem was the nights; I couldn’t stop shivering and finally went to bed wearing every garment I possessed.

The pain in my wrist has been of a different order.  I strongly suspected one of the unbuffered, sharply cut hooks was sticking into me, though if it was, under the plaster, I couldn’t see it.  There were gradually fewer ways of holding my hand that didn’t hurt.  Lying on the back of my hand, lying on the front.  Up in the air, pointing down at the ground.  In a sling, unslung.  I took painkillers and anti-inflammatories and carried on.  I took twice as many pills and the relief lasted an hour, then only half an hour, then they didn’t work at all.  I thought, well, I have metal rods up the bones in my arm, it’s bound to hurt and I know I have sharp ends of the hooks digging in, so it will hurt.  Get a grip, no pain, no gain.

My nose started bleeding spontaneously about two weeks ago.  Over this last weekend, thinking the best cure for anything is to think of something else, I started painting the fence.  The neighbours at the bottom had erected a new one, not in our colour and all six panels took three coats to cover them.  That’s eighteen to paint and another twenty three down the sides of the house, making forty one fence panels in total to be painted.  I think that’s plenty to keep someone’s mind off something.  So I got dressed in tat and found a huge rubber glove from my collection of left hand rubber gloves, that would go over the plaster.  This made a nice change because the fingers of that hand were starting to go a funny colour.  Waxy and sort of yellow.  I could have popped into the Simpsons as a hand double.  So I donned the glove with three stops to wince and one to shout out with the pain and then I got started.  Not doing my M.Jackson one glove dance routine but a very steady up and down painting of the fence.

Unfortunately, every time I leaned forward to load up the paint brush, my nose ran blood into the paint.  Fortunately, my chosen colour was orange.  It sounds awful but looks very cheerful on even the darkest day and, of course, it doesn’t show the blood.  So I stirred the blood in and kept on painting.

Despite the pain I’d had a lot of fresh air, so I slept for a change and I had a nice endlessly cheerful fence, which was good but the following morning I wasn’t good at all.

I was bad, oooooooooooo, really really bad.

Ladling out the cat food was so dreadful I yelped out and leaped around like an M. Jackson video extra.  The cats looked at me, a tad concerned, though their concern vanished when I managed to put the bowls on the floor.

I went upstairs and decided to stop being a wuss and do a workout.  I got into my workout gear and then lay back on the bed and considered suicide instead as an alternative to the pain in my hand and arm.  Then I went and phoned the hospital.  They had a fracture clinic which had overrun and was still going and could fit me in on the end.  I was ready to crawl there if necessary but the other half graciously said he would run me there before he went to the gym.

Well I saw assorted people and had an x-ray before the plaster technician cut the plaster off at which point, tough as I am, I really don’t know how I didn’t faint.

I had gone bad, bad, really, really, no really bad.

One of the hooks was just in a valley of what was left of the left side of my hand but the other hook, which had obviously been threshing around under the plaster had destroyed my hand.  Half of the back of my hand was a thin film of what used to be skin, gone black but still not covering a crinkled morass of what used to be my flesh, which had gone every colour under the sun, dimpled, pitted and falling off with a huge metal hook sticking out of the middle of it.

I wasn’t just bad I was rotten.

The reason my fingers were yellow was because they were dying off and I had no feeling in my thumb at all.

Even the doctor thought it was bad.

First he squirted me with a whole can of antiseptic (too late, I was already septic) local anaesthetic and then he took a pair of pliers and pulled the rods out by the hooks.

This was bad, it was bad, it was really, really bad.

And then he prescribed a load of antibiotics, decorated the oozing mess with the biggest sticking plaster he had, which didn’t reach the good bits round the edges (what was left of my knuckles and my wrist, far down) and then they plastered me again.

Finally last night, I slept.  And I got up and made a cup of tea and then I slept.

And just now I’m writing this and then I’m going to sleep some more.

Because………..

I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m really, really bad…………….

Septic!

Rotting!

I’m bad, I’m bad

(continue singing the chorus until one of us falls over, probably me.)

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JaneLaverick.com –local handyman.