From 17 March 2023 (continued)

Laying on the floor, kept comforted and distracted by ML and R. A paramedic phones at intervals, but after 5 hours, there is still no ambulance; eventually he advises ML to take me to the hospital herself. He talks her through getting me upright, down the stairs, into the car; that seems insane now because it turns out I broke my back.

I find out I’ve cracked a vertebrae in my upper spine after 18 hours in A&E, upright in a chair because there is no other option. They offer me morphine but it makes me more nauseous. ML and I spend the time in a bubble of our own making – devising word games to block out the boredom and pain and the crowds and distress surrounding us.

They send me home with a soft neck collar, anti-inflammatories, and advice to stay in bed on my back. ML riggs up solutions for any need I could have; she cuts snacks up into cubes, leaves them in tubs by my bed so I can eat lying down when she has to work. Hires a commode. Looks after me so hard.

7 days later I get a phone call from a doctor who’d looked at my medical notes and been shocked at the neglect; she calls me back into hospital to have a back brace fitted.

Except she couldn’t give me an appointment. I have to turn back up at A & E. Restart the process. Wait another 16 hours. 10pm a doctor appears, says gently nothing will happen now, and there are no beds, so best to sleep at home and return in the morning.

This is when I crack and cry. They feel for me. They feel bad. But nothing can be done.

The next morning, after only seven more hours this time, I get my Spinal Brace.

Well then it should have just been about recovery and healing, figuring out when to rest and when to push, that sort of thing. Except… I was still in pain every time I took a step. I knew something else was wrong.

You see the hospital had only half scanned me. And I couldn’t get them to scan the rest without going back through A & E. And I absolutely could not go through that again.

Doctors finally agreed to scan my lower half at my back clinic check-up, weeks later; it turns out I’d had pelvic fractures all along too. But they were healing anyway now, so nothing more to be done. I asked about physio. ‘No, you’ll be fine’, they said.

A & E staff work under intolerable conditions. There’s a whole other story here about the systematic dismantling of our precious NHS, and about people ending up in A&E because they’ve fallen through the net of disastrous cuts to social care.

Sometimes the violence of my fall leaps up and shocks me. But not as much as what happened afterwards, or rather what didn’t.