I used to sometimes try to catch her, but never even caught her name
Having slept all night with my leg elevated and another ice pack on it, I got up with extreme caution. I took a few tentative steps, leaning on ChrisC, to go to the bathroom. OK, my leg seems to be able to bear my weight this morning. Hurrah! It is not serious after all, and rapperaddict is not going to kill me.
On the way back from the bathroom, my knee informed me this was an incorrect assessment of the situation and collapsed under me again.
Bother.
I've never, formerly, "really" injured myself. I got through a childhood of falling off climbing frames, out of trees, and down stairs without a broken bone. I've sprained ankles and wrists, but never terribly seriously. I broke a tooth and needed stitches once falling off a skate cart, but that's about as bad as it ever got.
Assiduous readers of this blog may remember me falling off a wall in 2013. That hurt. It hurt a lot, but not enough that I couldn't walk around (if rather gingerly).
This knee problem hurt. But worse that that, I didn't seem to be able to put any weight on it at all. Things felt broken in a much more serious and frightening way than I was used to. I had a little wibble, sitting on the bed, and decided it was time to take Patrick up on his offer to drive me to hospital.
On the plus side, when I was sitting still with my leg up, nothing hurt. So I returned to my old friend the sofa and worked my way slowly through the breakfast Rachel insisted I eat before heading out.
The hospital was about half an hour away. And despite being in an area not particularly prone to English tourists, everyone spoke at least a little English. (As Rachel put it: doctors are educated people. In Austria and Germany, educated people will speak English.) Most people spoke to me in German first, but switched languages when I answered rather haltingly.
I was ushered very speedily through a door into a consulting room. At least, it looked like a consulting room at first, but it then turned into an office full of people. Would I take off my trousers and sit on the couch? Which seemed like a weird thing to do in what was basically an office, but there you go. I did it, and nobody batted an eyelid. I've always been led to believe Teutonic attitudes to undressing and nudity are rather different to British ones :) I was examined, and sent to be x-rayed.
The radiographer, who was a little abrupt, barked at me as I came in "Sind Sie Schweine?"
Um, am I pigs? That seems like an unlikely question. Also grammatically incorrect. So let's assume she didn't really say what I heard. Seeing me looking baffled, she tried English: "Are you pregnant?"
Aha. Sind Sie Schwange. A perfectly sensible question from a radiographer. I was not, so we proceeded.
Then back to the doctor in the consulting room. He'd looked at the x-ray. There was nothing broken.
Hurrah!
But...
Ah. There is always a but.
He suspected damage to two ligaments: ACL, and "the one down the inside of the knee" (maybe he didn't know the English. Neither did I.) I needed an MRI as soon as I got home. It might need surgery.
Bother.
Also, death at the hands of RapperAddict is alarmingly back on the cards.
Two orderlies descended on me. With terrifying speed, they produced a cybernautical legbrace made mostly of Velcro, and wrapped me in it. One injected me in the stomach with a thrombosis prophylactic while explaining how to inject myself with them every day in the future, the other fitted me for crutches. Overall, the experience was one of frightening efficiency. I was in, registered, examined, x-rayed, looked at, provided with aids and drugs and ushered out again in under 50 minutes. The only gap in the whole edifice of competence was noticed when I got home: I'd been provided with a CD which, rather than containing my knee x-rays, had a nice set of images of a 20 year old chap's shoulder injury.
So there was bad news on the knee front. But on the plus side, I now had crutches and could move myself from A to B without being wholly reliant on another person. I had a legbrace which, while I still couldn't put any weight on my leg at all, kept it from twisting painfully as I moved around. Getting home from Austria suddenly looked a lot less daunting. Rachel, who's damaged knee ligaments before, suggested that serious damage usually means serious swelling, which I didn't have. The Austrian hospital was probably being over-cautious.
In the evening, Patrick trundled us back to the airport (with a minor detour to a chemist. Someone had handed me some papers, but dropped in the German word Rezept which I had incorrectly registered as receipt. So we detoured to pick up my prescription from an out-of-hours pharmacy counter). ChrisC and I were stopping in an airport hotel overnight, ready for an early-morning getaway (this was always the plan, based on Monday morning flights being way cheaper than Sunday night). We sailed up to the first floor in the lift, and discovered that our room was about as physically far away from the lift as it possibly could be. By the time I'd reached it, my confidence was a little dented: crutches are extremely hard work.
But I made it out again (and back again) to eat a meal in the bar. Having not had a proper wash in what felt like forever, I planned to sit in the bath and use the shower head, but a small hotel bathroom, a rigid showerscreen and a leg that didn't bend conspired to make getting into the bath an impossible operation. I was sure it should be possible, but eventually conceded defeat. Instead, I flopped into bed ready for an early start.
Heroes of the day: Rachel, Patrick, the Austrian medical system, ChrisC.