Trying

After a lot of humming and hawing, middle child decided that it was time to get away for a working summer holiday and yesterday booked tickets and accommodation to depart tomorrow.

Last night as I was at my bookclub sitting in the back garden; enjoying the cheeseboard; and chatting merrily in a sort of end of term way, my phone began ringing off the hook. It was middle child injured in a park on the opposite side of the city but sounding reasonably cheerful, if immobile. My immediate reaction was to say, “Ring your father!” but then I remembered we are a one car family and I had the one car (serves me right for not cycling). Off I went to the rescue.

On the drive home, Mr. Waffle rang me to remind me that we had a double mattress in the boot and it would need to be removed to accommodate both the injured warrior and the injured warrior’s bicycle. Why did we have a mattress in the boot? Well, you may recall that I spent months swapping the content of the box room (the former fastness of youngest child) and the double room on the return (the Princess’s old room). I did this on the basis that she will probably never live at home again (sniff) and the youngest child should have the larger bedroom. For obvious reasons she was not pleased. He said he didn’t care beforehand and he was remarkably consistent afterwards. “How do you like your new bedroom?” I asked perkily. “Fine,” he said with zero enthusiasm, “but the mattress is really uncomfortable.” So we bought a new mattress and put the old one in the car to take to the dump. But then Mr. Waffle discovered that Dublin City Council are doing a mattress collection and all we had to do was email them and they would collect it from the front of the house. Great news. We await confirmation of our date but, in the meanwhile, the mattress is living in the boot.

I came home and dislodged the mattress. Meanwhile the texts from the park were becoming increasingly alarming: “I really can’t move at all.”; “Maybe I need to see a doctor?” I said to Mr. Waffle “Perhaps you should come too.” When we got to the park, Mr. Waffle went in to find the afflicted child and I looked for parking. Then Mr. Waffle called me to collect them. Mr. Waffle and I are not good at communicating directions of any kind to each other and it took some time to locate them. I heard Mr. Waffle say tetchily to the victim, “Your mother and I lack a common language for communicating directions.” I felt somehow that I was being blamed. One of us spent formative teen years orienteering and it wasn’t me. When we eventually found each other, the poor old victim was looking a bit miserable. A faithful friend had stayed with the victim to the end and I could tell that, eyeing the parents, she felt more support might be needed but we thanked her and sent her off into the night about which I felt a little guilty but we were in no position to offer anyone a lift home.

The victim’s poor ankle was swollen like a balloon and we felt that perhaps we should go to accident and emergency in the local hospital. Then we realised that three of us wouldn’t fit in the car with the bike. In retrospect, I feel we should have interrogated that assumption a bit further but as I said, we were tetchy. So I said grumpily, “You guys go in the car, I can cycle no problem” not for a second thinking that I would be left to cycle 3kms in the dark on a bike with a crossbar which was much too big for me. But my remarks were taken at face value and I found myself wobbling down the road in that lofty vehicle high dudgeon (not my joke, I suppose really high nelly here). It was ok but anytime I had to get on and off which was with surprising frequency, I kind of got my leg stuck in the basket at the back while swinging it over the crossbar so it could hardly be called elegant progress. I went through a park where someone was giving his XL bully dogs a run without muzzles or leads, one of them frolicking alongside me was some kind of enormous Doberman cross and I was nervous especially since I knew I wasn’t going to get up a head of speed on the bike but it just frolicked and left me to my cycling.

When I got home I hopped on my own normal sized bike and went to A&E. I foolishly thought it might be quiet on a Monday night in July. It was not. It was absolutely heaving and very miserable. We stayed until about 1 in the morning and did not even get to see the triage nurse let alone a doctor so I took an executive decision that we would go home and go to the private health clinic in the morning when it opened. I was a bit worried that the ankle might be broken and moving would make it worse but on the other hand, the child was exhausted and in pain and at the rate we were going, likely to be there all night. We went home.

After the misfortunate child (literally) crawled into bed, we put ice on the ankle and doled out powerful painkillers (the victim had some in stock having been prescribed them earlier by the dentist for impacted wisdom teeth, it hasn’t been a great time healthwise) and hoped for the best.

The swelling had gone down a bit in the morning but the ankle was still very sore so I took the morning off work (usually Mr. Waffle does this kind of thing but he had a conference in the morning and I, miraculously, had no meetings) and drove the afflicted child to the clinic. I was not delighted to be charged €75 almost before I got in the door. What am I paying an enormous sum in health insurance for, if I have to fork out in the clinic? This is not a question for Americans who seem to enjoy their own weirdly painful regime which is maybe even worse? On the plus side, a greater contrast to the hellish scenes of A&E the night before would be hard to imagine. The patient was seen immediately, x-rayed immediately, diagnosed immediately and the seats where we barely had to sit and wait were leather and not wipe clean plastic. Great news – no break! Less great news – a bad sprain, a torn ligament, crutches and a boot. The doctor looked slightly askance at the painkillers the dentist had prescribed and said that he would prescribe something less strong. I mean he didn’t know that the dentist looked at those wisdom teeth and said, “Wow, wow, wow!”

Anyway was this a child who was going to be going on a plane at 8 the following morning? It was not. When we got home we changed the flight booking. It was hard (expense, on hold to aer lingus – twice, you know the drill). But we did it. The question of accommodation we punted to another day and I went off into work on my bike to spend an afternoon catching up and Mr. Waffle promised to drop home over the afternoon to see how the sufferer was.

When I got home from work that evening like a damp, exhausted rag and told Mr. Waffle of my adventures he, very tactlessly, said, “But wasn’t this supposed to be a working holiday, is there any point going at all in a boot and crutches?” A fair point but an unwelcome one.

“And how is the sufferer?” you ask. Much improved after a day in bed and, as I write, at a friend’s house watching the world cup match.

How have the last 24 hours been for you?