Homeward Bound

I woke properly in the morning, after a night of rather on-off sleep to a nurse keen to get me up and organised,

"We think we can let you go home today. You just have to see the physiotherapists and they'll make the decision."

The surgeon came to have a look at me too.

"You seem fine. I think you should be able to go."

My fibula still seemed to be moving a lot when I moved my leg at all, but he wasn't worried,

"It will all start to stick itself together soon, don't worry. The tibia is the important bone - if you only break your fibula, you can still walk because the tibia is so strong. Fixing the tibia should stabilise everything well enough."

Jeremy and Ash arrived, having put Rowan on a train home to make space for me in the car. We all hung around for a while, then my food arrived, so they went off to seek their own sustenance.

When they returned, J helped me to get dressed in my own clothes. Fortunately I'd packed some loose   trousers to do yoga in, which fitted over the plaster a treat. I suddenly remembered - my best trousers had been cut off me by the mountain rescue! But I didn't have time to brood as the physios turned up, popped me into a wheelchair and whisked me off to a stairwell.

"We need to know that you have the hang of these crutches before you go. Have a try"

They set the underarm crutches up for my height and gave me the chance to move a little on them.

"Now for the stairs. Not as hard as it looks" - they showed me a one-crutch method for stair climbing - put your hand on the bannister, crutch under other arm. Keeping crutch at current foot-level, hop good foot onto step, reach further up bannister, lift crutch to current foot-level, repeat. Despite my nerves, I quickly got the hang of it, hoping up 4 stairs and down again, no problem! (Down is the same in reverse, pretty much).

They put me back in the chair, "Don't do more than you have to. Humans weren't designed to use crutches. They make you sore and you'll get tired very quickly.

So - nearly ready to leave, though we needed to get some pain killers and some blood thinners. I was shown how to inject myself with the heparin - apparently an important thing to do for anyone likely not to be moving much for a while.

J and Ash went to get the car, whilst a porter wheeled me down in a hospital chair. We chatted and it turned out the he'd been the cook on one of the ships my dad had served on in the merchant navy!

Musing on what a small world it is stopped me worrying how travelling in a car would work. I had to have my leg raised, so the only way we could make it work was for me to along the back seat with cushioning under my leg. We hoped a pillow at my back would stop me getting bashed by the door handle. It was actually fairly comfortable for a while and the seat belt worked ok if I put both parts under my arm and into the buckle near my leg.

The journey went fairly well to begin with, though after an hour or so, my backside was getting numb and I was keen to get a little relief. Fortunately, we found a roadside Costa with the toilet just inside the main door. It was my longest crutch walk to date and went fairly well, especially considering that the floor in the place had just been washed. We topped up on drinks and set out again.

Another stop at a motorway services allowed me some wriggle room to relieve the numb bits, but the loos were too far away to get to easily and with lots of folk milling about, we didn't attempt it. Fortunately, I was tired enough to doze the rest of the journey away.

At home we had our first big disappointment. I could use the crutches fine on the flat, but the 1960's entrances to our home had quite high steps, and I couldn't hop high enough to get in. After a bit of man-handling, I was finally home, and in need of a loo. I fairly raced down the hall on the crutches, and met the second come-down - our stairs were nothing like the wide, shallow ones in the hospital, and again, I just couldn't hop high enough to get up them.

We quickly worked out a method - sitting down and using arms and good leg to lift bum, which did get me up the stairs. A stool at the top allowed me to push myself up onto the seat so I had enough height to stand. Fortunately it was not too hard to get down the hall, and the bathroom was small enough that I could use the walls and the window sill to lower and raise myself from the loo.

Knackered, but thankful to be home, I crawled into bed and went out like a light.


Lessons learned:

Crutches take time to master and are very tiring to use (to begin with, at least)

Not all stairs are equal, so don't expect you'll manage to crutch up home stairs like you can in hospital. Remember that door-sills on older houses can be quite high too.

If taking a car journey home, you might do better to take A roads and use smaller road-side cafes which have toilets only a short distance away, unlike large service stations, where the loos might be far off and with lots of obstacles and people in your way.