Comedy value a.k.a. doing it for the kids

My feet, in happier times. Cordillera Blanca, Peru.

Back in the nineteen nineties I bought a copy of Joe Simpson’s book “Touching the Void”.  It was the second mountaineering book I ever bought. I am also not ashamed to say it was the first, and is the only, book that has ever made me cry.  I have read it many time since, and it still makes me cry.  Climber shatters his knee and lower leg near the summit of a remote Peruvian mountain; gets lowered most of the way down by his partner; partner cuts rope to save them both from dying; climber falls 150 feet into a crevasse, then spends four days crawling back to camp with no food, water, or medication.  Legend! 

I’ve often wondered what kind of sick or injured person I would be – whether I was stricken with Cancer Lance Armstrong-style, rendered paraplegic, or suffered some other fundamentally life altering injury.  Would I retreat into depression and self pity, or would I embrace life and all its opportunities, altered as they necessarily would be?  Thankfully I am pretty far from finding out, although the limited experience I have to date suggests I’d be somewhere short of the Simpson-Armstrong axis. 

On the second night home from hospital I awoke with what felt like unbearable pain in my leg, which would not go away even after munching more than the recommended dose of paracetamol and codeine. Anita was, as ever, both supportive and sensible. “You’ve been great so far, and its natural that at some point you are going to get fed up.”  “I’m fed up already, and its only been two days” I replied in a pitiful (and, I now know, overly dramatic way).  Shortly afterwards I fell asleep and woke up the next morning feeling rightly embarrassed about the night’s events.  As the surgeon told me when I sought reassurance about my long term climbing prospects, “On the scale of one to horrific, your injury is at the easy end.”  I’m not sure that’s a precise medical scale, but she was absolutely right.  Indeed, she later put it a different (and perhaps more accurate way): “this is more an irritation than a life changing injury”.

And she is right. Because in a matter of months I will (touch wood) have two fully functioning legs again. It’s a cliché, but there are many people much worse off than me.  It is said that clichés are usually true (itself a cliché), but in this case I know it for myself having spent two nights in hospital last week: I shared a ward with a motorcycle crash victim on the verge of having one leg amputated, a cyclist who had just had one leg amputated following a traffic accident, and a well-spoken elderly gentleman who was, essentially, dying.  So, one lesson learned already (I have several, which will be a separate post entirely – the anticipation!).

But back to where I started. I am, for the reasons above, neither in the realm of self-pity, nor heroic sporting fight-backs.  I am just a bloke who, like hundreds of others, has broken his leg and now has to spend a bit of time at home watching daytime telly. So where does that leave me?  I have always thought that there is comedy value in almost everything (children, priests (although not necessarily together), Swindon, Arsenal goalkeeping and Vince Cable to name a few) and minor leg injuries are no exception.  Take the following examples (which may or may not be funny – they seem funny to me, but I am essentially out of my mash on codeine most of the time):

On Saturday my sister brought my niece, Emily (aged 3) to see me. Emily rushed in with a huge grin, then stopped, pointed to my leg with a look of concern on her face, turned to my sister and said “Uncle Bay-vits has got a sore leg.”  She confirmed her diagnosis by noting that I was wearing a “plastic” on my leg. She can’t yet pronounce “Uncle David” or “Plaster cast”. I’m sure it will come.

Then, my American sister-in-law, Carrie, told me on facebook that her two and a half year old son Ethan (already a basketball prodigy and possibly well on his way to being a medical prodigy) was particularly interested in my injury: “Ethan read a book about a mouse with a broken leg and now is so excited that you’ve broken your leg too. Although you are probably less so.”

As I said, I’m doing it for the kids.