The agonised expletives that left my mouth when I first felt the pain in my wrist were sufficient for nearby skiers to think that they witnessing a heart attack at the top of the slope.
When Pierre, from the mountain rescue team, told me that people had thought I was having a heart attack, I momentarily wondered if I was making too much fuss. I had fallen and landed on my left arm from an almost stand-still position (I wasn’t even skiing!). However, lying in the snow, feeling pain like no other, I felt justified in my use of language.
Soon strapped into a stretcher, I clutched on for dear life with my good hand and clenched what I could clench, convinced that I was going to roll off. I knew that I would be expertly skied down the mountain, but it was still unnerving to be so low at snow level as we journeyed down the slope that I would normally have been travelling along upright on skis. The discomfort was excruciating so I diverted my thoughts to childbirth to compare the extreme pain. At least this kept my mind occupied until we arrived at road access.
Helped into the waiting ambulance, a form then had to be completed. There I sat, laughably incompetent, unable to read the form due to not having my reading glasses, unable to fill out the form myself due to my damaged writing hand and unable to sound out some letters in French to spell my address whilst someone else wrote. Although my French was adequate, I realised I was lacking some basic alphabet knowledge.
However, as luck would have it, there was an injured Bosnian man in the ambulance who didn’t speak French, but did speak English.
“Ah give it to me!” he said to the medical staff in slight exasperation, “She can tell me. I can fill it out for her.” With his own ski injury to deal with, he probably wondered if we would ever be leaving to get to the medical centre.
Minutes later, form filled out, he passed it back to the medical staff and off we went. Despite his damaged knee, the man from Bosnia sounded in relatively good spirits and, whilst I tried not to show any weakness through pain, I was grateful for the distraction of his conversation. He had previously lived in Leeds and also in Birmingham, but now he lived in Germany and he was staying with friends in Annecy and where was I staying and what was the accommodation like and what did I think of Brexit and what was the name of the other Brexit man, not Johnson, but the other one…It took me a few moments to realise that he was talking about Nigel Farage and I was glad to contribute and felt useful in recalling his name.
At the medical centre, with Farage forgotten, I watched my wedding ring being sawn off. I hadn’t removed it in 30 years and it felt like a momentous occasion that I needed to acknowledge. So I shared this information with the doctor, who politely and reassuringly told me that a jeweller could solder it back together. He probably had more pressing things to think about given the unusual shape of my lower arm.
“Oof!” the doctor exclaimed when he looked at the first x-ray and saw the double fracture and misplaced bone.
“Genial!” the doctor exclaimed when he looked at the second x-ray and saw the success of his manipulation of my bone.
Later that evening, with my arm safely ensconced in plaster, I relaxed with a beer and marvelled at the expertise of the rescue team and the medical attention I had received, where everyone had worked cohesively with the perfect level of reassurance and efficiency and with a welcomed small dose of humour – just what the doctor ordered!
Let Luce! 