Fractured Wrist

In all the years I’ve been cycling, I’ve been injured twice.  The first when I was ten years old, and a car ran me off the road onto the gravel shoulder.  Banged up my knee real bad.  It swelled up like a balloon, and the doctor had to drain off the fluid.  My knee was one big scab, and to this day I have a scar and sometimes the knee squeaks, and if I train running, and train hard, the knee will sometimes slightly swell.

This time – forty odd years later – I hit a curb.  Didn’t see it in the dark, and yes I had lights on my bicycle.  I was cycling to the Jubilee Library for World Book Night – where I was volunteering as a Book Whisperer.  As I approached the library, I hit the curb and went flying, instinctively tried to break the fall with my hand and fractured my wrist.

I spent the evening reciting poems to to people who were hanging about and periodically went on stage to perform. As the evening progressed my wrist got less and less flexible, until finally I realised I couldn’t even applaud my friend, Bernadette Cremin’s performance.  It hurt so much, both the poignancy of her poems and clapping the two hands together.

Back in the green room, the wrist was dunked in ice, and I was plied with glasses of red wine.  Bernadette insisted I go to A and E – as they call it here.  “It’s fractured,” she said, “Go!”.   And a storyteller drove me there, waited with me and drove me home.

So I haven’t been writing – I’m just now getting back to two-handed typing.  And writing this is about all I can do for now.  I don’t even seem able to draw a metaphor from the fractured wrist – at least not tonight!  Might have something to do with the stuffed-up head and chest infection?  I have however been fine-editing my ‘I Could Have Been a Banker’ video….I’ll post a link…..

So much for Post a Day!

By the way, congrats go out to Bernadette – who today received news from a publisher that they want to do a book of hers! Go Bernie!