Breakable

Late yesterday afternoon, my mum was getting on the bus to go home after having a wander around the shops, and her legs suddenly just gave way. Over the phone, it sounded like she just keeled over on the steps. She wanted to get x-rayed, though she didn't seemed to be hurting enough to have broken anything.

A visit to the after-hours doctor and a few x-rays later (I had to translate for her and then swiftly remove myself from the room before my womb got zapped by the rays), it turned out that she'd managed to fracture and impact her upper arm. After the first hour or two of being shocked and stunned, I think she took it pretty well. I was told to take her to the hospital, just down the road, to see the orthopaedic registrar for an expert opinion. Apparently, there was a chance she'd go "into theatre". My mum isn't the singing and dancing type, so I took it to mean that there was an alternative to throwing her arm in a sling and letting the bones heal themselves.

My infamous navigation skills (i.e. none), the vague directions given by the doctor and the worst fog I've seen since Guy Fawkes' Night in a Edinburgh on a very foggy night, meant that the five minute drive to the Fracture Clinic took about half an hour. Out of four possible hospital entranceways, I managed to find the three wrong ones.

Anyway, by 9pm we'd seen the orthopaedic registrar's assistant and there wasn't going to be any "theatre". A nurse put a little foam sling on mum's arm and made it clear she was going to need a helping hand with showering and stuff, for the next few weeks. Oh, and some very strong painkillers.

I got mum back to her house, with a diversion to the after-hours pharmacy for Voltarin on the way, fed her the tablet, was refused help with getting her ready for bed, and left without remembering to tell her that sleep may be less painful if she sits upright in bed instead of lying down.

It was well past my bedtime by the time I got home, and I'd been on the go for about six hours with only a nasty muesli bar to keep me going. So I was hideously disappointed to find that I just could not fall asleep.

Isn't if funny (well, funny as in peculiar) that when you get insomnia, you tend to finally drop off to sleep only about an hour before the alarm goes off?

I don't do well without enough sleep (yes I know, I'm going to be in trouble in a few months' time), so I let myself sleep in and went in to work mid-morning.

I was still worried that mum might not have had much sleep herself though, so I called her to check in. Apparently that Voltarin is pretty hot stuff. She'd slept like the proverbial baby.