Hospital + 1 week

Saturday 27th September: So it’s a week since my fall. A week on crutches, walking (if you can call it that) at a snail’s pace, my entire radius of activity restricted to a few hundred yards of my front door.

At least the work I’ve been doing this past week has been sedentary , correcting the proofs of the book. My deadline was yesterday (Friday 26th) and the original plan, naturally, was for me to hand-deliver them to Harry Scoble - my editor at Hodder & Stoughton - on the Friday. As it turned out, I managed to complete them and get them in the post by Thursday 25th.

It took a good few days (about five) for the bruising to come-out; and now it manifests its “full colours”. Not pretty; the entire back upper half of my left leg, from behind the kneecap right up to the buttock is a tapestry of purple/black blotches and broken veins. It looks like someone has rag-rolled my thigh…badly. It’s not nice at all. And the toes remain numb, albeit moving freely.

Of course, now that the bruises have surfaced, it’s near-impossible to actually sit down comfortably, especially on any kind of hard chair. Consequently, I now have dangling from my crutch a plastic carrier bag with an old cushion in it, and I use that to sit on, especially in my local coffee shop (I’m still not sacrificing my cappuccinos).

I still feel like I’ve had somewhat of the stuffing knocked out of me. This will be a long, slow recovery, I fear; taking it day-by-day, week-on-week, making sure I don’t try things I am not yet physically ready for yet. And making sure that every time I put my left leg forward the kneecap is going forward too, and not backwards (few tendons, see?).

One thing this incident has brought home to me is: just how isolated I am. I’m an only child, both parents now dead, I have no one to ‘come home’ to (auditions being held…well, er, all the time!)…and, I must admit, somewhat grudgingly, just how much I’ve relied on the NHS [National Health Service] in this matter.

What meetings I have lined up, well, for the present they will have to come to me out here in Redbridge [N.E. Greater London]. And any plans of mine I had to go into town (London) will have to be postponed. So, that waistcoat (6-button, double breasted with a vast sweeping shawl collar in salmon pink shantung silk) I was planning to have made up shall have to wait a while. Damn! I need cheering up…