Sinister Dexter
The weather is ugly and these are black days and nights. Leaf mulch and ribbons of damp cardboard wrap around trees. They wad the gutter and stuff the drains. Tree-roots snake under paving, trapping water and cracking the footpaths. Sudden ice, rain and snow blind the glasses-wearer. For those with an astigmatism light has a halo that smears the lens, a wanker Jack O' Lantern leading you off the path and into the uncertain darkness. Traffic clings to gutters in the rain, skidding through puddles, so pocket tsunamis drench the unaware. Things shift, stain and pollute. The world is not safe to walk on. Not for me.
I nearly lost a leg once.
Once, a long time ago, doctors, not tattooists, had designs on my leg. They were going to cut it off but they didn't tell me until the leg was safe. They nearly didn't tell me at all but one of them let it slip. They told me by accident.
I smashed my knee. Badly. I did it falling down some stairs. I was sober, since you were about to ask. It was a break that was completely out of proportion to the fall. A serpentine break, coiling through the bone. It went on to be quite famous: the knee that snapped around the world. The doctors had never seen anything like it. I could hear them outside in the hallway laughing and calling over other doctors to whoop at the x rays of my splintered knee on the light-box. I sat there in my pants, unable to move, a curtain half pushed past me while on the other side of the room a crying teenage girl, comforted by her mother, was being given bad news by a doctor. Thinking back it seems incredible that a young girl was being given life altering news in the same room as a man in his pants half hidden by a curtain. We could both hear the laughter of junior doctors. Sickness is never dignified but somebody could have made an effort. They could have closed the door. They could have shifted the curtain another two feet. I promise I would have done so if every movement hadn't been agony.
I was in that hospital for three months. They pinned the bone but gave me MRSA which lived on the metal they had stuck in me. I had something like eight operations just to clean the wound and stitch it up again. They put me in a hospice room to quarantine me from other patients but this also meant they often forgot to feed me. In the end I didn't mind as the food was so bad. My parents would visit once a week and bring me wraps from the local pub which I would devour, but I lost nearly three stone. It was a long hot summer and the hospital was closing down to make way for a brand new one. If I'd broken my leg a month later I would probably have been fine.
The hospital was filthy. There were no locks on the toilet doors. One day I was greeted by a fat little man in a wheelchair coming out of the lock-less bathroom. He had a leg missing and was trailed by a cloud of cigarette smoke. He gave me a saucy wink as if he'd got one over on the hospital somehow. Before I could walk there were days no one took my bottles of piss away. I grew the dye out of my hair and grew a beard that was a sort of orange tartan. People would visit me in my little gallery of piss jars and I'd sit there with my balls hanging out unable to talk and with a huge straight fro of two tone hair. Its safe to say I went a bit odd. One day my physiotherapist asked me how I was feeling and I burst out crying. I CLUNG to my poor girlfriend.
It was when I was out of the hospital that they told me I had nearly lost my leg. It hadn't occurred to me, even though it should have done. A junior doctor I had never met before appeared with my notes and told me quite blithely in the corridor that it was good news, Mr Higgins, I would be able to keep my leg. When I reacted to this he went puce and started to look very unwell and had to have a sit down. The poor man - it must have been a blow.
My leg never healed properly. It is a different shape now. It is slightly bowed and strangely angled. There is a long fat pearlescent scar running from knee to shin. It looks a bit like the cover of White Pepper by Ween. My leg is effectively an inch shorter and I have a limp that I have managed to convert into a slightly comical gangster's roll. You do what you can. I broke five separate bones that year because I was learning to walk on crutches, with a different shaped leg or with both of these while drunk. My balance is permanently damaged and I'm certain I'm due all manner of arthritic horror in my joints as I get older.
And that's why I don't like snow and rain and wet leaves and the dark. They put me in a room in high dudgeon full of bottles of piss and man with a knee like meat wrapped in butcher's paper winking at me through a cloud of cigarette smoke. And I aint ever going back.
But hell, you should enjoy your sledging. You'll probably be fine. You always are.
I nearly lost a leg once.
Once, a long time ago, doctors, not tattooists, had designs on my leg. They were going to cut it off but they didn't tell me until the leg was safe. They nearly didn't tell me at all but one of them let it slip. They told me by accident.
I smashed my knee. Badly. I did it falling down some stairs. I was sober, since you were about to ask. It was a break that was completely out of proportion to the fall. A serpentine break, coiling through the bone. It went on to be quite famous: the knee that snapped around the world. The doctors had never seen anything like it. I could hear them outside in the hallway laughing and calling over other doctors to whoop at the x rays of my splintered knee on the light-box. I sat there in my pants, unable to move, a curtain half pushed past me while on the other side of the room a crying teenage girl, comforted by her mother, was being given bad news by a doctor. Thinking back it seems incredible that a young girl was being given life altering news in the same room as a man in his pants half hidden by a curtain. We could both hear the laughter of junior doctors. Sickness is never dignified but somebody could have made an effort. They could have closed the door. They could have shifted the curtain another two feet. I promise I would have done so if every movement hadn't been agony.
I was in that hospital for three months. They pinned the bone but gave me MRSA which lived on the metal they had stuck in me. I had something like eight operations just to clean the wound and stitch it up again. They put me in a hospice room to quarantine me from other patients but this also meant they often forgot to feed me. In the end I didn't mind as the food was so bad. My parents would visit once a week and bring me wraps from the local pub which I would devour, but I lost nearly three stone. It was a long hot summer and the hospital was closing down to make way for a brand new one. If I'd broken my leg a month later I would probably have been fine.
The hospital was filthy. There were no locks on the toilet doors. One day I was greeted by a fat little man in a wheelchair coming out of the lock-less bathroom. He had a leg missing and was trailed by a cloud of cigarette smoke. He gave me a saucy wink as if he'd got one over on the hospital somehow. Before I could walk there were days no one took my bottles of piss away. I grew the dye out of my hair and grew a beard that was a sort of orange tartan. People would visit me in my little gallery of piss jars and I'd sit there with my balls hanging out unable to talk and with a huge straight fro of two tone hair. Its safe to say I went a bit odd. One day my physiotherapist asked me how I was feeling and I burst out crying. I CLUNG to my poor girlfriend.
It was when I was out of the hospital that they told me I had nearly lost my leg. It hadn't occurred to me, even though it should have done. A junior doctor I had never met before appeared with my notes and told me quite blithely in the corridor that it was good news, Mr Higgins, I would be able to keep my leg. When I reacted to this he went puce and started to look very unwell and had to have a sit down. The poor man - it must have been a blow.
My leg never healed properly. It is a different shape now. It is slightly bowed and strangely angled. There is a long fat pearlescent scar running from knee to shin. It looks a bit like the cover of White Pepper by Ween. My leg is effectively an inch shorter and I have a limp that I have managed to convert into a slightly comical gangster's roll. You do what you can. I broke five separate bones that year because I was learning to walk on crutches, with a different shaped leg or with both of these while drunk. My balance is permanently damaged and I'm certain I'm due all manner of arthritic horror in my joints as I get older.
And that's why I don't like snow and rain and wet leaves and the dark. They put me in a room in high dudgeon full of bottles of piss and man with a knee like meat wrapped in butcher's paper winking at me through a cloud of cigarette smoke. And I aint ever going back.
But hell, you should enjoy your sledging. You'll probably be fine. You always are.
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