The very unusual Lacebark Elm outside Whittington Hospital (the tallest in London)

Dear Readers, sometimes I feel as if I’m turning into my Mum and Dad. A trip to the hospital on a sunny day feels like a treat! I have a pile of letters from the hospital arranged in date order! But that isn’t to disguise the fact that things are definitely improving, though slower than I’d like.

While I’m waiting at the Fracture Clinic, the Olympics are on a large-screen television and I watch the open-water swimming. Gordon Bennett, these women are tough! One of the other patients is watching something on her phone with the sound up, and I see the man in the front row (foot in an orthopaedic boot) glare at her, sigh, and then turn back to the television. It’s annoying, for sure, but in these troubled times I think we could all do with being a little more tolerant. There are things that need to be addressed, and things that don’t. As a friend of mine says, ‘Is that the hill that you want to die on?” Good question.

Then it’s off to the X Ray department, then back to the clinic, then in to see the doctor. She shows me where the bones are starting to heal at the fracture site on my leg – just a little fuzzy, cotton-wool hill over the break. It almost makes me cry, all those cells doing their job of trying to mend. It’s not quite such good news with my incisions – one on my ankle is refusing to heal, while another one has a tiny bit of sub-dermal stitch showing. Sub-dermal stitches dissolve automatically in the body, but shouldn’t be showing on the outside. So, the surgeon wants to see me again in a fortnight, and in the meantime I see the nurse, Anthony.

To sort out the stitch he needs to pull it up with tweezers and then cut it off as close to the skin as he can.

“It reminds me of when I have to pull a hair out of my chin”, I see, probably unwisely seeing as he’s wielding a scalpel.

He has to stop while he chuckles away.

“That’s exactly what my wife does”, he says.

“Ladies of a certain age”, I say.

Stitch trimmed, he re-dresses the wound on my ankle, and sends me away with a fine bunch of plasters. Hopefully the skin cells in my ankle will soon be as efficient as the ones in my tibia.

And on the way home, we get the same Eritrean driver who picked me up after my operation. He remembers exactly where we live.

“I’m getting better!” I say.

“Praise God!” he says.

And now I’m back on the sofa, but when I get up to go to the toilet I won’t have to use my crutches. The advice is to take it slowly, and stop when it gets too painful, or if the leg starts to swell, which is likely apparently. I know it hurts at the moment, just from wandering around the hospital, so it’s going to be a balancing act, for sure. But it feels as if we’re over a hurdle, and that is always a relief.

Onwards!