At about 11.30 one of the nurses took me through to a second waiting room and handed me a backless surgical gown, a disposable paper robe to go over it, and a giant paper loincloth.

“Have you ever worn modesty pants before?” she asked.

A bit of fiddling and a few false starts revealed that they went on like a pair of string bikini bottoms. (I’d like to point out here that I’m inferring this similarity rather than drawing from any well of personal experience.) I can report that although they may protect one’s modesty they do very little for one’s dignity. Had the option been presented to me, I think I’d rather have gone commando. Presumably this is the very reason no such choice was offered.

I was left alone for another 20 minutes or so and then led along to the anaesthetic room by the same nurse. To jump up on the gurney under my own steam and clench my fist to offer the anaesthetist a suitable vein was a far cry from being wheeled passively down the last time, when the metal had gone into my arm in the first place; this time round I felt a bit like the Dish of the Day at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, happily encouraging the sawbones to take a poke around my insides. I was hooked up to blood pressure, heart rate and blood oxygen monitors. “Christ”, I thought, looking at my 90 bpm pulse on the screen, “I’m going to have a heart attack. They’ll have to fix that too while they’ve got me under.”

It became a bit of a game to calm myself down, talking to the nurses and the anaesthetist to keep my mind off things, all the while keeping an eye on the ECG. I was at a rather healthier 70 bpm the last time I remember looking at the monitor. Not exactly Lance Armstrong, but respectable, I thought, under the circumstances. Eventually the anaesthetist told me he was starting the flow of the anaesthetic. No-one asked me to count backwards from ten or anything, so I decided instead to narrate how I felt as it took effect. “Wow, it’s cold. I can feel my vein inside my arm. And it’s prickly! A bit like pins and needles or something. It’s warming up; it must be more or less body temperature now. I’m starting to feel a bit woozy. Wait, am I? Yes, I am. Woo. I—”

In hindsight I must have seemed a bit weird.

I dribbled back awake in the day surgery ward. I didn’t have the same on-off-on sensation as last time, where it had seemed as if no time elapsed between conking out and waking up; instead, it felt more like I’d fallen asleep normally and had woken up after a few hours. A nurse came over to check me out and feed me some painkillers. A few hours later, when I was up and about and not losing my place in the middle of sentences, the same nurse presented me with my drugs ‘n dressings take-away bag and I was hurriedly discharged to free up the bed.

My Dad gave me a lift back to the flat in Glasgow and Ash kept an eye on me that night. I was a zombie for the next two days: the first I spent on the couch, comfortable in ascribing my lethargy to the residual effects of a general anaesthetic, but by the time I’d narco-slept my way through a business meeting the morning after (wherein the acquisition of our company was relayed to us, no less, and where despite my more than passing interest I could not keep my eyes open) I was starting to wonder what was going on.

“Seriously, I’m constantly on the verge of passing out,” I told a workmate as I popped another of the Tramadol painkillers the nurse had given me. “I have no idea why.”

And then later that day I looked up Tramadol. It’s an opioid, or synthetic opiate. “Ah,” I thought, “right.”

I took no more Tramadol after that, and coincidentally had a massive crap the next day. Yup, same side effects as morphine.

* * *

I was changing my dressings the other day, and I tell you, it’s pretty bizarre when the sight of staples in your arm is no longer a Big Deal.

Me: “Yeah, the elbow’s fine; I’ve been commuting by bike most days, and I think the extension might even be a little better since last time I saw you.”

Consultant: “I’m pleased with how it’s come on. If you look here, you can see the joint has healed very well, and the break in the shaft of the humerus looks to be successfully bridging.”

“Damn, that shit is pimping,” I could hear him thinking. “Boo yah.”

He was so pleased, in fact, that he decided it was time to think about taking some of the metalwork out; namely, the stuff in my lower arm. (Just to recap: to gain access to the broken joint during the operation, they broke off the end of the ulna and then fastened it back together with a couple of pins and some wire.) The waiting list for this sort of surgery is only a month or two long, and he told me to expect a letter confirming a date for the operation in November.

We shook hands and I cycled back up to work.

On the train home that night, my elbow was actually starting to play up a little. It felt a bit tender where it brushed up against my sleeve and so I took off my jacket and gently checked around the metalwork in the ulna, noticable as a few hard bumps and protrusions under the skin.

And then, I could have sworn I felt the pin move inside my arm: just a tiny, millimetric slide, but a movement nonetheless.

A massive, body-wide shudder pulsated from my stomach outwards and I had an interesting few seconds contemplating the ramifications of having been able to move a foreign body embedded within my arm. With hindsight, this is probably a good thing; it means that the pin is no longer necessary to hold the ulna together. At the time though, it just freaked the shit out of me. I think the doctor is right: it’s time for this particular pin to come out!

Okay, so replace “mundane” above with “rather depressing”. To cut a long story short, I was starting to get a bit scunnered.

There is light at the end of the (train) tunnel, though. My consultant, the estimable Mr Oliver, now opines that the smallest of the three pins in my arm—the one at the olecranon, put in there to hold the ulna together—can almost certainly come out in a few months’ time. This is good news, because that’s one that I can feel rubbing against the bone when I put my arm down on a desk, and might just be restricting the extension a bit. And hell, I almost enjoy surgery by this point. Hit me with some more of that sweet, sweet morphine, Christoph!

Next, in case that doesn’t happen, or the joint is just fundamentally restricted for good, I’m rebuilding the bike with a pair of aero bars to shorten the required reach. Through a process of deliberately flawed reasoning, I’ve used this as a justification to invest in a pair of disc brakes and hence a whole new epic bike-building project with which to regale you, dear reader, and which commenced last week as the first new parts arrived.

Things finally started happening again at the weekend.

On Friday evening I hurried through a sunlit George Square to meet up with Ash in Ad Lib in the Merchant City, collapsed into a booth and then ate myself silly. Ash murdered a steak and I took apart a seafood risotto as we drank a few beers and talked about nothing in particular. The restaurant has a bit of a ’30s feel with marble and tiling all around which shone in the reflected sunlight, and I was as happy as Larry for not much more reason than I had a beer in my hand, king prawns in my belly and my girlfriend across from me. We hit the 13^th Note for a couple more, then sat outside Mono until the chill in the air finally got the better of us and we jumped on the last bus home, full, fou and unco happy.

The next day I took the Trøll over to a Saab garage in Govan. The MOT is in the offing and the clutch is bordering on absent, so I wanted a professional estimate of the financial damage. The owner took it for a spin round the block to check it out and I was slightly shocked by the sheer volume when it burbled back into the garage, that oddly distinctive exhaust note echoing off the walls.

“It’s loud, isn’t it?” I said to him as we regarded its oily bits, up on the ramp.

“Aye, it’s the 16-valve,” he replied. “I used to work on these when I was a lad. Really great motors all round.”

I am not ashamed to say that I felt a bout of intense, faintly ridiculous man-pride at that moment, my choice of retro-Swedish yuppie glamour making this lifetime Saab mechanic misty-eyed with nostalgia. We shook hands and I promised to bring it back next weekend.

The rest of the week shot by in a blur of train journeys and deadlines at work. I visited Jeff at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh as he recuperated from an operation to reattach his Achilles tendon (I hadn’t thought I’d be returning the favour quite so soon), and then charged back to Glasgow last night for a Coba Fynn gig at the Liquid Ship. Charlie and I though we were good; Doug was ambivalent and Davis was hopping with morose rage. The ‘Fynn returns!

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!

Saturday was the first full day after the op, and I woke up considerably more human than I’d gone to sleep. I was still under the influence of the general and the morphine and whatever else they’d given me to keep the pain and/or consciousness away, but I was capable of dragging myself to the toilet and using it once I was there, and I counted this as progress.

My arm was enormous. It was swollen to maybe twice its normal size and in quite considerable discomfort but the most striking thing was the weight: I could barely lift it at all. A physiotherapist came to the ward sometime before lunch and had me work my wrist, elbow and shoulder, and showed me some simple exercises to help loosen them all up. I was slightly aghast—and told her so—that I was being encouraged to exercise my arm the day after a brace of plates, a pin and 10-15 screws had been put into it through an 8-inch incision, but the physio just smiled thinly and told me that this is how it is nowadays. No more wrist-to-shoulder cast and 6 weeks off; now, physiotherapy and exercise straight off the bat are considered the best way to regain full or nearly full movement.

Visiting time rolled around and I was besieged by visitors. Friends, family, band- and workmates came by in heavy rotation for the whole afternoon while I sat in the wipe-clean chair beside my bed and recited the circumstances leading up to my current state to each and every new group. I was rather humbled by it all, despite a rueful suspicion that it was rather like finding out who’d come to your funeral.

Hospital routine set in over the next couple of days: the lights were rudely thrown on around 6 or 7am (depending on how authoritarian the night shift was); breakfast, lunch and dinner were accompanied by temperature measurements, blood pressure tests and pills and occasionally a subcutaneous Warfarin injection in one’s stomach; cups of tea arrived at regular intervals, and the lights would go out again at 9 or 10pm.

At this point the night chorus would begin. My roommates were a couple of older chaps recovering from falls, and a talkative motorcyclist with an almost comical number of injuries. Both of his forearms were strapped up; two fingers were splinted; his right foot was in a cast and his brows were fractured. During the day he would shuffle around lamenting his luck and waving his arms above his head to reduce the swelling, and at night he would be consumed by sleep apnoea. He would snore uncontrollably, lapsing into silence for seconds at a time and then jerk back to the normal rhythm with one massive snorting intake of breath. The two older chaps slept on their backs, snoring gently but supplementing this by belching and breaking wind, occasionally waking themselves with the thundering ferocity of their emissions.

My arm hurt. The ward sounded like broken plumbing. It was hard to sleep.

The weekend came and went without sight of a doctor, although I seemed to be in one piece and my blood pressure—high after the operation—dropped steadily back to normal. Unfortunately for my chances of getting out on Monday, my temperature spiked at 39.5°C on Sunday.

Dr Ng, one of the surgeons who had worked on my arm, appeared on Monday morning to take stock of the situation. He carried out a few tests and checked my chart, making some cryptic remarks into a dictaphone (“Patient was pyrexial over the weekend; positive for Froment’s sign; adduction weak but present,”), and then explained the operation and its results in detail.

Having cut open my elbow they broke the tip of the ulna, the lower bone in my forearm, to get access to the elbow joint. (Yup, that’s right: as Doug pointed out, they further broke my arm before fixing it.) They reassembled the fractured humerus as best they could, screwing two plates into it to hold it together, and then moved the bruised ulnar nerve out of its normal path and to the inside of the elbow joint. The tip of the ulna was fastened back in place with a pin and a wire, and the incision was closed by about 30 staples. The whole procedure took about three or four hours. This is the X-ray he showed me a couple of days later, on my discharge:

X-ray (after): pins and needles

A cheerful nurse named Leo had taken off the fabric dressing. I couldn’t see much apart from a ridge of skin being crimped together by a few staples, but Dr Ng took a look at it and declared it good. “Because of your temperature, I want to keep you under observation for a couple of days. We’ll reassess whether you can be discharged then.”

So I spent the next three days chafing at my semi-imprisonment. It was odd: having had this apparently major operation, increasingly small things began to niggle at me. I’d already managed to have the drip (there to keep the line open for the neglected morphine pump) disconnected on Saturday, and the next irritation was the cannula sticking out of my hand. Once that was dispensed with a friendly pharmacist called Christoph took me off the IV antibiotics I’d been on since the operation, and stopped the anticoagulant Warfarin injections since I was able to get up and about under my own steam. Another physio—the third in as many days, and a student this time—had me walk up and down some stairs to show I could manage back in the real world. Each move back to normality felt like a small victory.

The last really odious condition of my internment was the food. I hadn’t really registered how vile it was until Monday lunch, when we were brought a lukewarm, sludgy approximation of pasta & sauce which caused me to gag a little as I choked it back. Devon*, who seemed to have an instinctive distrust of hospital food even without my mentioning it, had already offered to bring in dinner for me one night. At the time I refused, thinking that this was above and beyond the call of visitation duty.

The pasta broke me. I left a voicemail pleading for some normal food.

Jeff & Devon arrived on Tuesday night bearing aluminium trays of lamb and sautéed potatoes. Devon cut the rack into single-rib bite-size pieces for me and I popped them one by one into my mouth. It was great. I could have cried with gratitude. I slept soundly that night: the swelling of my arm was finally retreating, my belly was full of real food and my pills had been scaled back to a simple combo of paracetamol and ibuprofen.

I was nervous waiting for the rounds on Wednesday morning. Dr Ng arrived, looked over my charts and checked the wound again, then told me I could go home. I gingerly pulled on my clothes—a final victory!—called my Mum, who had offered to ferry me home, and paced around the ward until she arrived. The nurses gave me a couple of boxes of painkillers and a week-long course of oral antibiotics, and I was sent on my way. And that was it: just less than a week after smashing my elbow into bits, I walked out with a bruised and tender bionic arm, a handful of pills and a physiotherapy appointment. I’ve got around 45° of movement in the elbow; my pinkie and ring finger are more or less out of commission until the ulnar nerve recovers (which could take anywhere from a month to a year); my GP wrote me a sick note for the two weeks off work, and that’s that. Fin.

* Jeff & Devon visited every day from Saturday through to the day before I was discharged. They are awesome. The brought me glorious food, magazines, fruit and Dr Who Top Trumps, and you can’t say fairer than that. Well, you could argue that they should have let the invalid win at Dr Who Top Trumps every now and again, but perhaps I’m being churlish.

The anaesthetist (no name again, I’m afraid) came in to ask about drug allergies and to explain what they were going to do to put me under, and then a little while later the consultant—Mr Oliver—arrived with a gaggle of interns. He explained the operation in pretty much the same terms as Mr Woods, the A&E surgeon, had done so, but with added joviality and an amiable playing-to-the-crowd manner. I bantered politely about PACS and the like and then concentrated on breathing shallowly and gritting my teeth until they came to take me away.

Around 9am (probably; my sense of time from the morning before the operation until about Saturday afternoon is muddied from the discomfort and the anaesthetic), a porter arrived to wheel me down to the theatre. A student nurse, who had earlier asked if she could sit in on the operation, came along with us. I watched the ceiling lights pass by overhead.

For the first time since I’d arrived, I was starting to worry about the outcome of the operation. I babbled away about this to the porter and the nurse, stating my concerns that:

• They might chop my arm off;
• They might sever a nerve and leave my arm dangling like a fish on a line;
• I might get an infection;

and so on. The porter was sphinx-like in his concern. The student nurse reassured me enough to quiet me down by the time we reached the anaesthetic room, a sort of antechamber to the operating theatre. The same anaesthetist was there again and started talking to me, presumably to gauge my alertness, while I stared fixedly at the ceiling and tried to ignore the scratch of a bigger-bore cannula being inserted into a vein in my left hand. A second (senior?) anaesthetist told me they were going to put a ‘block’ into my neck to stop movement of the arm, and asked me what I did for a living. (I found out later that they usually ask people to count down from 10 to judge when they go under, but apparently I was so forthcoming on the subject of medical imaging software that they thought that would do instead. I suspect they were glad when I finally conked out.) I felt another scratch in my neck, but they must already have given me something because the feeling was quite dull—

—and then I swam back to consciousness. I appeared to be back in the ward, and my brain gradually reassembled itself from its constituent parts. Ash was there, sitting by the side of the bed (what a sight for sore eyes!) and my Dad was at the bottom of it. There must have been some mistake, because they’d replaced my arm with that of a morbidly obese person, then wrapped it in a bandage from wrist to upper arm.

I had no recollection of anything after the second anaesthetist had asked me about my job, and more weirdly no sense of a passing of time since then either. I remember working on a virtual colonoscopy project a few years ago, and it was explained to us that a traditional colonoscopy—involving the insertion of an endoscope where the sun don’t shine—is so painful that the patient is given an ante- and retrograde amnesiac drug to prevent them from remembering anything before, during or after the procedure. It isn’t uncommon to hear screams coming from the room in which the colonoscopy is carried out, but afterwards the patient emerges blissfully unaware of all that has passed, so to speak, except with a marked discomfort when sitting down. I wondered if they’d given me similar drugs.

The consultant came back in to explain how the operation had gone. Woozy as I was, I don’t remember a great deal about what he told me, except that I retain the distinct feeling that he was particularly pleased with how awesomely they’d managed to put my arm back together. In hindsight, I’m slightly surprised that he decided to carry out his debriefing while I was still flying the friendly skies on the wings of a general anaesthetic.

From this point on, my memory of Friday is mostly informed by other people. My attention came and went, and I don’t recall things happening in any particular order. My Dad picked up my Mum, coming back from a holiday with some friends, and she came in to fuss over me in the early afternoon. The night though, is lodged quite firmly in my memory.

I was hooked up to a self-administered morphine drip where I could trigger a dose every 5 minutes at most. For some reason (possibly because the anaesthetic was still in my system; possibly some misguided stoicism from the night before), I’d made the decision to stay off it. Around 4pm my resolve crumbled and I hit the button. It didn’t numb the pain, but it did make it easier to deal with, and I used it intermittently until the lights went out and I tried to fall asleep. The thing was, I’d been on an IV saline drip since the night before, and after the operation had knocked back about a gallon of water to compensate for the pre-op ban on fluids. I was massively bloated, and there was no way in hell I could make it to the toilet.

I hit the button to ask for help from a nurse about midnight or so, and Mohammed the staff nurse pulled the curtains around my bed and helped me onto a commode beside it.

I couldn’t pee. I couldn’t crap. Morphine causes quite severe constipation, it turns out. It also causes nausea if you’ve taken a lot of it, and I had. I spent about two and a half hours on that commode in the most wretched night of my life, straining to pass some—any—urine and vomiting regularly into these upturned cardboard trilby hats they give you to be sick in. I filled four of them with a watery, whiteish liquid and was eventually persuaded back to bed (I was in no danger of wetting it, I can assure you) by another nurse about 2 or 3 am. I slept fitfully.

“Any chance of a CT scan?” I asked, ad nauseum.

The A&E doctor eventually had me sent for an X-ray. This was not fun. It was, in fact, the least amount of fun I’d had since falling off my bike in the first place. I was wheeled through to an adjoining room and then had to get into a chair by the X-ray machine under my own steam. My God, it hurt. I wasted no time in relaying this to the nurse, switching seamlessly from another appeal for a CT scan.

“I was down here the other week at your radiology department, you know—oh, you want me to get up? OH JESUS CHRIST.”

She directed me to position my elbow at a 90° angle on the end of a table. Eyes watering, I tried to do so.

“Just a bit more.”

“Argh.”

She moved the X-ray machine into position, moved off to the control panel, and returned again. She took another X-ray and helped me back onto the wheelchair. I repeat the next exchange verbatim:

“How does it look?” I asked.

“It’s pretty bad,” she said. “It looks like it’s broken in maybe 5 places. You’re doing well—most people would have passed out from the pain by now.”

Dripping with sweat, throat dry and smashed elbow cradled pathetically in my lap, I almost laughed. My night was made.

A surgeon named Mr Woods came along to take a look at me a while later. I was a little more lucid by then; the general horror had worn off and a sort of self-deprecating coping mechanism had taken over. I was going to be polite and helpful if it killed me. He prodded around the elbow a bit, mulled over the X-rays on the A&E PACS workstation, then called his boss. I heard some murmuring about coming in that night, but in the end he came back across to tell me that they would operate first thing tomorrow morning. I must admit, it sounded daunting.

“Your arm is broken in about 7 places.” (This figure seemed to vary based on who was doing the talking.) “We’re going to clean out the puncture wounds, then put in a couple of plates to fix your humerus back together. It’s about the worst fracture of this type I’ve seen, and there is a small risk of nerve damage or infection. We’ll take you up to the ward, then come and get you again in the morning. No food or drink until then, okay?”

Dehydration from those few glasses of wine, and nothing to drink since then bar a couple of fingers of water to wash down the painkillers meant I was absolutely parched. “Nothing at all? I’m really, really thirsty.”

“We’ll put you on a drip. That should take away the thirst.”

He wrote “ORIF→” on my right wrist, the arrow pointing to my elbow, and explained that this meant “Open Reduction, Internal Fixation,” or an open surgery to set and fix the bone with plates and screws.

The A&E doctor came back then to put on a temporary cast, incredibly managing to do so with almost no motion of my arm, and then a nurse came back to hook me up, putting a cannula into my left arm and attaching it to the first of an endless stream of bags of saline solution. I was left alone for a while and called Ash to explain the accident and my current sorry state. With that done, I sat back to try to relax a bit. The muscles in my arm would occasionally spasm, twitching the bones and making me wince involuntarily. I looked around to take my mind off it. With the cubicle curtain left open, Mr Woods, still at the A&E desk and looking at something on the PACS, could see me peering over at his monitor.

“Want to see the X-rays?” he asked.

“Can you get me a CT scan as well?” I checked. “No? Then the X-rays will do.”

I was wheeled over on the trolley, and he swung the screen around so I could see it. This is what he showed me:

X-ray (before): “There is some…deformation.”

I was momentarily lost for a polite way to respond.

“Holy shit.”

They wheeled me to a quieter cubicle to let me get some sleep, then I was taken upstairs and into a ward with three other sleeping casualties. It was about 4 am, and the operation was supposed to be at 9 am the next day. I slept as well as I could, waking up to take a couple of awful, jarring trips to the toilet with the whole of my awareness concentrated on my upper arm, where I could feel the bones rotating uselessly against themselves despite the cast. I collapsed back into bed to wait for the morning.

The rest of the team filtered in gradually. We ate Gordon’s excellent chilli and various pies of savoury, sweet and occasionally indeterminate disposition; I talked with authority to Gordon’s son Jamie about Doctor Who, and knocked back a few glasses of wine over the course of the evening.

About 11.30pm I was starting to flag; I was feeling a bit knackered and knew I still had 6 miles or so to cycle back to Jeff & Devon’s where I was staying that night. I weighed up how much I’d had to drink and decided I should be okay, cushioned as it was by a fair amount of food. (Gordon and Dave both said later, unprompted, that they wouldn’t have let me go if they’d thought I was incapable.) I said my goodbyes, unlocked the bike, found my way back to the Edinburgh Road and got into my stride a few minutes before midnight.

The road was dead quiet; a few cars passed me going the other way, but other than that it was quiet. I was coming up on the “Welcome to Edinburgh” sign, the prom only a half mile further on or so, when suddenly—and I really mean without warning—the bike disappeared out from under me and I hit the road. I don’t really recall the impact itself.

Over the next short while, a number of things occurred. That is to say I did those things, but I don’t have much memory of willing them to happen or of actually carrying them out. I levered myself off the road in a quite serious amount of pain, and hopped around whimpering for a bit. My bag (one of those single-shoulder, messenger-type ones) was sort of wrapped around me, and I managed to get it off. How, I don’t know, because the next thing I did was to check my right arm, clutched by then in my left hand.

I waggled the fingers. They seemed to work. They felt a bit numb.

I let go with my left hand. My right arm dangled. There’s no other word for it. I tried to move the elbow, and the forearm flopped around in a worryingly unconstrained manner, accompanied by a sort of internal grinding sensation. I gasped. I couldn’t believe it.

Right arm cradled slightly against my body, I lugged the bike just about off the road, giving up when the kerb got in the way and the pain got too intense. I collapsed against a wall at the edge of the pavement and rested my right arm against my leg.

I sat there, teeth gritted, for a minute or so. Two or three cars went passed and I tried to wave them down with my left arm, but each and every one of them carried on. Indignant, I managed to get my phone out (I can’t imagine how bad things would have been if it had been broken in the fall) and dialled 999 for the first time in my life. Somehow I always imagined it would have been for someone else.

The operator answered quickly and I told them what happened, and where I was. I remember being as polite as possible, and surprising myself at how calm I was. They didn’t mention how long it would be, but I must have looked at the clock on my phone because I have a vague recollection that it was around 12.15am.

I waited. My right arm felt slightly warm, and very painful.

Time passed. A group of three guys walked past on the far side of the road, took one look at my tangled bike, pained face and gammy arm, and kept on walking. Fuck you, I thought. A bit later another guy was walking past, on the phone to someone.

“Are you alright mate?” he asked.

“No, not really. But the ambulance is on its way so it’s okay.”

“Fair enough,” he replied.

Oddly, I wasn’t too bothered that he carried on: I didn’t really know what he could have done, and the fact that he asked at all mollified me a bit.

The ambulance did in fact arrive shortly after that. My God, what a welcome sight. The paramedics tied a sling around my arm, helped me to my feet and into the ambulance and onto the trolley in the back. They told me their names—Lynn and Kevin—and I decided to try to remember the names of all the people I might meet during the course of the night from now on.

“Hi Lynn, hi Kevin. How’s your night going? Mine pretty much sucks.”

Lynn went to the cab to radio the hospital, while Kevin helped me peel off my cycling glove and then, more dauntingly, my jacket. It went reasonably well. Then we noticed the blood which had been dripping down inside the waterproof arm of the jacket and onto the crotch of my jeans. He grabbed a radio mic or a dictation mic—I don’t remember which—and rattled off the symptoms.

“30-year old male, fell off his bike. Right elbow is bruised. I can see one puncture wound roughly a centimetre in size, and another smaller one. There is some—” (here he paused to pick the right word) “—deformation.”

“A puncture wound?” I asked. “Why would I have a puncture wound?”

Kevin looked at me.

“Oh, right. I see.”

“We can’t give you any drugs, unfortunately. They’ll do that at the hospital. We can give you air and gas,” he offered.

“What’s that?”

“We give it to pregnant women. It won’t ease the pain but it might take your mind off things.”

“Oh, yeah. What is it again? NO₂? Screw it, if it doesn’t ease the pain, don’t bother. I’ll survive.”

We drove off to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, lights flashing.