Dave the Dad 24 - Getting a Leg Up
If men are from Bradford then women are from Reigate, or something like that. It’s certainly the case with me and Jane. There are times when she completely fails to comprehend why I can never remember the name of the road we have to take between Southampton and Reading in order to get to Wales. ‘Aha,’ I counter, ‘but I can recall the exact genealogy of Wuthering Heights’. My smugness usually lasts until we find ourselves a little past Winchester on the wrong road, heading in the wrong direction, to the wrong country. This is where my argument collapses. But anyway you need opposites. In a relationship it keeps things lively, interesting, balances strengths and, crucially I find, dilutes weaknesses. A case in point occurred ten days ago at the local A&E. But let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.
Tom fell. Normally we pick him up and plant him on his feet but this time something was clearly amiss. He couldn’t stand unaided, couldn’t stand aided for that matter, and just cried. Although he calmed down within a few minutes he still couldn’t put any weight on his right leg so we at least assured ourselves that nothing was horribly wrong by applying some gentle massage. The local surgery opened an hour later where our doctor topped all her previous startling expertise by finally confiding to Jane that ‘something seemed to be wrong with his leg’ a diagnosis aided considerably, we felt, by Jane introducing Tom with, ‘There’s something wrong with his leg’. She gave him a painkiller and told us to take him to Accident and Emergency if things didn’t improve in five hours. Phew, were we relieved! Thanks Doc!
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I had kept up by text and so was relieved that by the time I came home from work Tom seemed surprisingly happy, sat in a hollow of cushions on the sofa, as much Bob The Builder as he could bear on TV, surrounded by raisins, breadsticks and bits of his mum that had worn away and fallen off her throughout the day. The problem was that he didn’t really know he was ill; that not being able to stand on one leg should have made him listless and sad and sleepy. No, he was just as excitable, just as crazed when someone walked past the window with a dog, just as loud and friendly as normal. He just wasn’t mobile. This meant a) Jane had had to do everything in her power to keep him interested and b) he didn’t get very tired and so could keep going all bloody day. Or, as Jane succinctly put it when she fell into my arms ‘Not moving….loud bubbly…not tired….bubbly….loud….help.’
Accident and Emergency was a blast for Tom. The porters were friendly, the nurses chatty as they entertained him by squeezing different parts of his lower body and the Doctor who saw him actually seemed to know something about medicine. In fact his only flaw was his desire to tell us how many hours he was due to work that weekend, but even this he did very well, racking up a rate of approximately once every 28
seconds.
However the X-Ray room was a different prospect altogether. Here short albino beasts scuttled around in the semi-dark, muttering to themselves like mad otters whilst occasionally lobbing their arms about as though warding off a flying antelope. Certainly one of them had never been in a room with a human child before and I’m guessing that the other two had taken refuge in the hospital years ago when Doug McClure invaded their kingdom. Still, as part of the polite middle-classes we pretended not to notice and instead popped a wary Tom up onto the table only for an unseen albino claw to flex in some dark corner of the basement and unexpectedly lower the X-ray machine. It took a full two seconds for Tom to notice the advance of this huge, grey, buzzing, metal object but when he did, Boy, did he notice it! The full-on, thrashing, screaming, wide-eyed, horror-struck fit that followed probably had the hidden female trolls giggling through their wizened beards, although the one in the room with us did manage to successfully hide her enjoyment.
It took four minutes for both of us -now reassuringly clad in leaden overalls- to get him prone on the table and as we straddled his bucking body the woman (for want of a better word) said ‘You’ll have to forcibly hold him down or not get it done’. Jane reacted a micro-second before I was about to leave, whisk away our crippled son and let him hop through life; anything but endure having to pin him down as he screamed into my face. Jane, though, thankfully, is from Reigate and she was strong enough to say, ‘Let’s just get on with it.’ It was, as you might guess, horrible. But we got the scan, found he hadn’t fractured anything and went home in the knowledge that it was more than likely a bad muscle sprain that would ease over the weekend.
I only got lost once on the way back and as I recited the complex bindings of the Linton/Earnshaw relationship Jane was surprisingly quiet. It was only after we got home that I found that most of her senses had shut down shortly before Cathy married Edgar. Well, she had been busy, so I magnanimously let her off this once. Just this once mind.
April 10 2007
Dave Fouracre aka "Dave the Dad" is a regular feature writer here at thebabywebsite.com.
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