The Unluckiest Break

Sometimes it amazes me how rudimentary we are in these highly technological times.

The young fella next door broke his leg playing football the other day and is now sporting a cast that starts at the foot and finishes so high up the thigh you just know Nursie must’ve plastered the underside of his baubles. The break itself is below the knee so if ever there was a case for inappropriate medical touching then that has to be close.

And it is one of them thick plaster jobs that you just know is going to make doing anything, like sleeping, nigh impossible. Not to mention the compound fracture he’s likely to sustain banging his wrist against it every time he has a wristey and given that he’s 15, it’s on for six weeks and he’s immobile for much of it, that’s a lot of solitaire.

Eventually they’ll cut it off and apply one of those snazzy fibreglass jobs but it always surprises me that the basics in life are still that; basic. If you break a bone then there is no quick and easy means of fixing it and you’re fucked. Basically.

I’ve never broken a bone. I’ve claimed to but only because it was a good means of hiding the fact that I was and am, extremely soft. Once such time was when I deflected a cricket ball, travelling at some velocity I might add, from me balls, with my little finger.

Some smug bastard in the team had the audacity to call that potentially life changing moment a ‘missed catch’. Admittedly it was a classic case of what they in the cricket fraternity call an ‘in and out’ though; my testes detracted in with fright and the ball fell out from the vacant area they once hung.

My finger wasn’t broken of course but it sure felt like it.

I tapped it to the phalange next to it and everything, for dramatic effect, but it really was only sprained. Still, my street cred went up that particular period in the neighbourhood and I was King Dick there for a while too, untill Dennis’s brother went and upped me by splitting the webbing on his hand whilst trying to catch a cricket ball.

The show off.