To continue this ‘Tales of Broken Bones’ megathread (with mercifully brief off-topic sidetrackings about the health of Fleck and Egan), here’s my tale...
A good few years ago I broke my leg playing football (yes
Trafford, playing football). I went to A&E and, after a five hour wait, they took a quick look, told me it was a bad sprain, gave me some tubigrip, some medication and some crutches, and sent me hobbling on my way.
Two days later I went abroad for a week-long piss up (a.k.a. my best mate’s wedding), whereupon I stopped taking my pills (you couldn’t drink alcohol with them) and discarded my crutches, and embarked on a vigorous programme of cultural activities*, including whole days walking up and down the cobbled streets of old cities.
(* Mainly the ‘drinking culture’)
A month later and back at work, a colleague said to me,
“listen, I used to be a ski instructor and have seen enough sprains and broken bones to know that that’s not a sprain”. Well my leg was, if I say so myself, a rather magnificent, and very impressively swollen, purple colour (not quite as magnificently purple or impressively swollen as my mate’s penis following a circumcision at the age of 30 I hasten to add, but I digress - that’s another story altogether).
So I went off to see the company doctor, and one X-ray later was the proud owner of a two-and-a-half inch fracture of the tibia.
So I walked around with a broken leg for a month, not because I’m hard (
Trafford and
Kenilworth will attest to the fact that I’m more John Inman than John Egan), but because it doesn’t always hurt quite as much as you imagine it does.
The moral of the story? Snapped limbs are more fun than this season.
P.S. For an encore, having missed a season with the broken leg, I broke my finger (pulling up my socks in the changing rooms before my first game back in a pre-season five-a-side tournament) and missed another season (I was a goalkeeper so a broken finger isn’t ideal), and then on my third game back the following season I saved a close range piledriver with my eyeball and lost the sight in one eye (thankfully I regained my vision after a week). The following season I retired from football.
