Footloose

When we arrived in Dunedin on Saturday afternoon we spent our time lolling around the motel room, napping with the self-assurance that we would have all day Sunday to recover from any late-night excesses, see the exhibition at the Blue Oyster Gallery, visit the Chinese garden.  We planned to make our idle way back to Waianakarua on Sunday afternoon and pick up more cheese for our relatives in Oamaru on Monday (today) before returning home for tea.

These plans were all going swimmingly until around nine on Saturday night, when I stepped in a small, concealed hole-in-the-floor at the bottom of some stairs at the party venue and fell, spraining my right ankle with swiftness and efficiency.  Fellow guests bound my ankle in ice while I lay on my back, dazed, confused and tended by the señor whose presence, on his knees, led the host to call out (erroneously) to all that a proposal was taking place.

Around the road at the emergency medical centre (don’t go to the ER, the guests told us; you’ll get norovirus) I was wheelchair-bound, the better to admire my ankle which resembled by now a softball.  An x-ray suggested a possible fracture, but with everything still in place I was declared unfit to drive, drugged up and fitted with crutches adjusted to my modest height.  (How long, I said to the señor, before I call them crotches by mistake?)  The young doctor (a fellow gamer, the señor quickly established) and the nurses were kind and sympathetic, and no-one derided me as I took a tentative practice-run on the crutches up and down the corridor.  They seemed heavy, cumbersome and my dependence on them alarming.  A guest at the motel had a word in my ear: there is no technique.  All you can do is hop and hobble.

So we had no mobility, no ability to drive between us, one car and a change of plans.  The most imaginative suggestion as to how we got home yesterday, in comments below, will win the truth.  Meanwhile my busted ankle continues to shrink a little and I can now put my foot down.  This makes the humble activity of going to the toilet rather less terrifying.  In the last forty-eight hours I have been blessing the existence of disabled toilets continually.  That hand rail to which one can cling like a ship’s rail is the difference between seating oneself with dignity and pitching backwards into the unknown, including the possibility of missing the throne altogether.  How relieved I am to have escaped that fate.

I am philosophical if not quite stoical.  Such things happen, and I was glad to have the señor with me, to be among friends and to be close to home, although I’m sorry that all our Dunedin plans were thus cut short.  I felt a retrospective fear at the all the adventures on which I’ve roamed further afield, and thought of my friend who sprained her ankle on the way back from Gallipoli, back in the day.  Tomorrow I brave the classroom once more.  I intend to turn my not being able to leap up and down from desk to whiteboard as a learning opportunity: the students can write up on the board their own points of vocabulary, instead of my doing it for them.  Plus it gives me a reason to wear sneakers to work.