Friday 21 – Tuesday 25 September 2018

You may have perceived a little tardiness by this blogger.  Well it’s actually not tardiness as I trust you will come to realise.  After posting the last blog on Friday, reporting the aromas of Di’s chicken curry on the outdoor stove and our expectations of Stefanos famed Mildura restaurant for lunch the next day, we took a stroll beside the lovely Murray river and sat admiring the beauty of the spot we had chosen for the night.  Just before sitting down to dinner, I headed for the rubbish bins.  This is when it happened.  When I tripped and fell on garden edging.  Immediately I knew I had broken my ankle,  With Cherrie and Di by my side, Garry called the ambulance and waited at the gate for it.  He watched the whole episode of Gardening Australia on his phone while he waited.  The ambos arrived after about an hour (thoughtfully just long enough for Garry to finish with Costa) administered morphine and got me to Swan Hill Hospital.  The rest of the story is too gory for me to go into in its entirety but suffice to say that I was not seen by a doctor until after midnight and she was too young to be up that late.  She diagnosed what blind Freddie could see, that I had a broken ankle but the radiologist could not come in until tomorrow so just lie there and relax.  With a plethora of pain killers.  Cherrie, of course, stayed with me until about 1am when she got a taxi back to the park.  Tomorrow didn’t produce the radiologist before a nurse, this one with some training, discerned that my right foot had no pulse.  Apparently this is serious enough to warrant emergency treatment and a doctor with a degree appeared and I was whisked away with a flurry and an entourage to the plaster room.  I was anaesthetised with a hallucinogenic while they manipulated the ankle into a more acceptable position and set it in plaster.  This revived the pulse.  I was coming down from the terrifying high of the ketamine when Cherrie, Garry and Di came back to witness the whole confusion.  An X-ray revealed a fracture in the left ankle too and a less than satisfactory reduction of the right ankle, so more anaesthetic.  I put down  my proverbial foot (for that is all I have now) and the nice and good nurse arranged for a proper general anaesthetic, from which I awoke with two plaster casts.  A transfer later that day to St John of God Hospital in Bendigo (this is when my private health insurance becomes a blessing) and emergency surgery on Sunday night gives me plates and screws in my right ankle and a relocation and set of my left ankle.  I will be able to weight bear eventually on my left, not on my right for many weeks.  I will be in rehab in Bendigo for at least 2 weeks and then hopefully home in wheelchair and on crutches.

By mutual agreement the camper adventure to Perth is aborted.  The McDonalds, all three of them, are on their way home now.  Cherrie will return the camper van in Sydney tomorrow, ably assisted by yet another wonderful neighbour Bryan, and we await news of when she can come back to Bendigo to transfer me home.  That will be a slow transfer over some days.

Here endeth the blog.

Until next time.