I’m alive! Or rather, life is gradually converging on normality sans about 15% or so of my previous physical capacity.

After spending the five days in hospital I lay around the flat for the following week, exercising the Playstation and the usually-dormant dishwasher; my arm was still non-watertight and I felt guilty at the mountain of dirty plates I generated each day while Ash was at work. I was persistently knackered, but ironically enough could never sleep for more than a couple of hours before the stiffness in my arm woke me up. (Only now, four weeks after the accident, can I sleep reasonably well.)

At the end of that week I had three appointments in as many days to assess my post-operative roadworthiness: first with the ERI ortho consultant Mr Oliver; next a physiotherapy session at the Victoria Infirmary, and lastly to see my new GP just up the road from the flat.

The ERI appointment proceeded at a glacial pace but was happily devoid of “Oh my God, we’ve fixed it all wrong” drama. I was processed through three waiting rooms over an hour and a half like a ruminant morsel, having new X-rays taken and my staples removed on the way. Before the appointment I’d been rather apprehensive about this, but in the event it was anticlimactic. A nurse (a student I recognised from the ward, and who chatted away to me as she worked) used a scissors-like device to break and pull out the staples one by one, then cleaned up the wound—almost fully healed by now—and put a few skin closures over it to protect the last couple of angry-looking areas. After a final bout of waiting the consultant looked briefly at the X-rays, professed his satisfaction at his bone-fixing prowess and sent me on my way with a warning not to drive or lift heavy objects.

The next day I walked up to the Victoria Infirmary for my physiotherapy appointment. I had no idea what to expect, but my assigned physio Maria seemed to be nice enough. She asked me to explain what had happened and how they’d fixed it and referred to my file as she listened. I noticed that there seemed to be no X-rays in there. This seemed to me to be a startling omission. After all (and at the risk of harping on about it a little), the bones in my arm were in 5-7 more pieces than normal and being held together by a number of self-tapping screws and metal plates. To my relief, she asked if I had the X-rays myself and I gratefully showed them to her on my phone.

“Right then: let’s get started,” she said, and what she meant by this was: “I am now going to hurt you.” This may not be quite such a surprise to you if you’ve ever been in the physiotherapy hot seat before, but I was surprised and hurt (emotionally and physically) that no-one had warned me unprepared for just how arduous this was going to be.

Physiotherapy is not a nice -therapy like massage or aroma. It’s firmly in the electroshock camp.

Maria massaged (read: kneaded like bread dough) my taut but massively bruised biceps to loosen it up, and then applied herself to bending my forearm back and forth, up to and beyond the limits of its movement. I clutched the bed with my left hand each time the tendons complained and the muscles twitched in my right.

Next she had me hold my hand out and flip it over and back, rotating about the axis of the arm. “That’s good,” she said.

Thank God, I thought.

“But I think we can still get a bit more out of it.” She seized my hand and twisted it round and back repeatedly. I gritted my teeth as some ligament or muscle clunked each time she did so. “Oh! A little click there,” she relayed to me.

I left the appointment sweating and faintly light-headed. She had managed to coax a few more degrees of movement out of my elbow though, so the shock was tempered slightly by a grudging optimism.

The GP appointment was a walk in the park by comparison. In fact, the GP herself came off worse than I did, wilting a little as I explained why I needed a doctor’s note for work. “I have X-rays on my phone if you’d like…?”

“No, no. Twenty years doing this and those kind of injuries still turn my stomach.”

The next Monday I was back at work, and the last two weeks seem for some reason to have barrelled past in a blur. Annabel & Antonio were across briefly, occasioning a few drinks; Austen & (other) Maria visited us over in Glasgow for a few more; Ash & I ploughed through the excellent first two series of The Wire, a convalescing gift from Neil which I shamefully neglected to watch while actually convalescing.

So now, two weeks later: my old boss Gordon, whose leaving do was the catalyst for the all this excitement, has actually left work; Ash & I are planning a holiday to Florence, our first in ages; and the brief sunshine of last weekend lit up the southside so that it was prettier than I’ve seen it since we moved here. Business resumes!