Tuesday morning I decided to travel to work despite the discomfort. I did not want to leave my colleague Jack on his own. I would not be able to drive the car with my gammy hand so I left particularly early and took a train from Brentford to Ashford. I checked out where I had tripped and saw there was a manhole in the pavement somewhat below the level of the surface. Nothing I could really claim over. I got to work walking in through the front door looking and feeling like death warmed up. Instead of my usual cheery good morning to the girls in the office, I could barely acknowledge a wan smile and a wave of the hand. However, I rang the head office and the manager promised to send down a colleague from London to replace me. Once he arrived I was free to catch a bus and get to the A&E at the West Middlesex Hospital.
There were nearly a hundred people milling around in seeming chaos. On closer inspection I could see they were being served in an orderly fashion by a harrassed staff. We were being assaulted by the sound of crying babies, one of whom managed to achieve an exceptionally high pitch on the scream measuring chart. It must have been an exceptionaly agonizing experience for the parents, but one could have little sympathy as the baby's scream jarred on everybody's nerves, patient and staff alike. Of course, this being England, nobody outwardly complained about the noise. However enough patients felt sufficiently discomfited to complain about how long they had to wait and to seek an upgrade in their waiting time, which was automatically refused.
I was directed to the first window to register my name, to a second window to give more details of my accident and where I was given a yellow sheet of paper with my particulars and my ailments. That yellow sheet of paper had to be presented to a third window. After that the long wait began. I kept wondering whether I was not making too much of a fuss over my ailment, when there were so may stressed patients, many in pain, waiting mostly quietly, for their turn.
Eventually, after a further hour, I was led through the door to a lovely nurse who expressed surprise when I explained that as a 76 year old I had tripped while leaving my place of work. She asked further questions and affixed a cannula for a blood test.These are like opening up the entrance gate to a third dimension, an inner secret world governed by veins and arteries. I went back out into the waiting room again. Then I was summoned again and interrogated by a young doctor who checked my bruised knees, my hands and wrists, and gave a cursory glance to my face, still partly caked in blood on my nose and mouth. It was like checking the landscape after battle following my earlier violent encounter with the earth. I pointed out that my right wrist and my thumb were giving me trouble. After a further wrestle with that part of my body he ordered an x-ray and sent me along a well signed intricate path through the hospital to the imaging department. After a further registration desk with a bored young assistant, I was able to enter the strange observaion platform where our inner world is revealed and examined. There followed a further wait in the crowded waiting room. Finally after another twenty minutes the young doctor called me in and announced I had a fractured bone in my thumb. I was almost relieved at this news. I was relieved that I had a genuine reason to be there without feeling that I was a fraud for sitting there and taking up so much time for a busy staff. Proudly I let the doctor fix a wrist and thumb stabilizer on my right hand and allowed to go home. I rang my wife, who reminded me I still had to buy something in the hospital shop. My visit to the hospital lasted 5 hours.
That evening I finally made our joint applications for a U.S. visa. I solved the problem of having to quote a U.S. contact by putting down the address of Fred Olsen Cruises USA in New York. Problem solved.
The Tory conference is going to pieces. Liz Truss may as well resign now. She is being gunned down by those Tory MPs who thought her mad or bad, or worse, and also those who had backed her to the hilt in the media, only to find that she had retreated, over the abolition of the highest rate of tax, over moving forward the date of the next budget from the end of November, and over keeping universal cerdit benefits in line with inflation. On that last there was no final decision. Her extraordinary attempt to defy the existence of a recession, which she professed throughout the long leadership campaign, has finally hit reality. Some Tory MPs think she will be out by Christams, but I cannot see the legal mechanism by which they could do that.
And Ukraine has made advances in "Russian" territory in Luhansk and Kherson. What can Putin do now? Let off a nuclear bomb in, or near, Ukraine? Apparently the relevant missiles are being transported now by train through Central Russia.
I went to bed early only to find that nobody in the hospital had remembered to remove my cannula. It was still there pinned to my arm.
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