Chapter 16
‘Is there anywhere that doesn’t hurt?’ the GP, who Hamish had called Dr Millen, had asked her, somewhat irreverently, Florrie felt, considering how much pain she was in, but he’d been satisfied that, since she was ‘walking wounded’, getting down off the dry slope under her own steam, she couldn’t be in particularly grave danger now she’d made it to his consulting room.
This hadn’t seemed to reassure Hamish, whose colour had drained from his face entirely. He was watching the examination through rounded eyes.
He’d been afraid to hold her hand, he’d said, so had supported her by the waist all the way to the first responder’s car.
That guy had taken one look at the swelling in Florrie’s right wrist and the bizarre angle of the thumb on her other hand and driven her straight around the corner to the health centre.
The younger doctor, Alice Hargreave, who Florrie remembered being introduced to at the repair shed when everyone was fixing up the Christmas lights, had taken images with a portable X-ray, before she’d been wheeled back into Dr Millen’s room.
They’d insisted on the wheelchair, and her legs were so shaky she’d agreed it was probably a good call.
‘Alice?’ Dr Millen had said, stepping aside so the younger doctor could give her opinion on the images as they generated on his computer screen.
‘Ah!’ Dr Alice said grimly, turning the screen for Florrie to see.
Hamish watched from over her shoulder. ‘So, what we’re seeing here are typical skiers’ injuries, I’m afraid.
That…’ she pointed with her pen to a grey area at the root of Florrie’s thumb, ‘is a partial tear to the ulnar collateral ligament.’
‘OK.’ It hurt like hell, that’s what Florrie knew.
‘Otherwise known as Skier’s Thumb. It’s often caused by gripping onto a ski pole when falling.’
Florrie couldn’t recall what had caused her to fall, but she knew that her whole body had tensed up, doing the total opposite of everything she was supposed to, and she’d hit that slope like a space rock crashing to earth.
‘I’ll splint your thumb to help stabilise it,’ the doctor went on. ‘But I’m not seeing evidence of a fracture there, so that’s your good news for the day.’
‘Does that mean there’s bad news?’ Hamish said, shakily.
He ran his hand in circles over Florrie’s back in a way that seemed to draw some of the pain away from her right wrist, which was throbbing horribly and turning a livid purple.
‘Unfortunately, you have a distal radius fracture in this wrist.’
‘That’s the hand she put out to break her fall,’ Hamish said, and when Florrie glanced up at him, he looked like he was replaying her accident again behind glazed eyes, his mouth contorted as though, inside, he was still screaming her name in horrified disbelief.
She remembered what he had sounded like as she tumbled down the slope.
He’d sounded even more afraid than she had been with the ground rapidly coming up to meet her face.
‘Can you see here?’ Alice pointed to something in the image which Florrie’s unpractised eye couldn’t make out, especially not now the lovely pain relief was kicking in.
Weirdly, Dr Millen had administered it in a spray up her nostril; not something she relished Hamish witnessing, but she supposed she’d left what remained of her dignity at the foot of the dry slope.
‘We all have two forearm bones, see? A distal radius fracture means a break in the thickest bone, here, at the wrist end. It must have absorbed a tremendous amount of force before it gave way. It means I’ll have to set this wrist for you now. Is that OK?’
Florrie would have agreed to anything now that the room was turning swimmy and warm and she was being aided by lots of careful hands to lie down on a padded exam table.
‘I’m thirsty,’ she heard herself saying, and both doctors told her at the same time she’d have to wait until later.
Alice and Dr Millen moved around her, putting something wet and clingy over her right hand, and something stiff and uncomfortable around her left thumb joint.
It might have taken an hour, or it could have been the work of minutes; she wasn’t all that sure, but she did know Hamish didn’t leave her side, even for a second.
Every so often she heard him inhaling sharply through gritted teeth as he watched, as though he was somehow experiencing the pain that she was now numb to.
Alice had told him it was all right, Florrie wasn’t feeling anything. Which wasn’t strictly true.
She was feeling her eyes unable to tear themselves from his face.
She was wondering why she hadn’t noticed the startling periwinkle blue of his irises before now.
They’d been plain old blue before. She was feeling astonished that he was sticking around.
There was no need, really, and she’d tried to tell him so, but he’d insisted on staying like he was responsible for her.
And she was feeling something else; great fractures in her emotional armour.
The cracks were spreading, like the crazing on her omma’s old china dishes, every time Hamish brushed her hair from her clammy forehead.
Her eyes dropped now to his lips, which she hadn’t noticed were softly pink and plumply bowed, like rosebuds.
He was wincing and telling her, ‘That’s quite a bad scrape on your cheek,’ but all she could think about was the sweet way the white tips of his lovely teeth revealed themselves between the pink petals of his lips when he spoke.
‘Rosebuds,’ someone was saying, stupidly. ‘Is that all right for a man? If I say rosebuds?’ Whoever was talking should probably shut up before they made a complete fool of themselves.
‘Huh?’ Hamish was leaning closer, turning his ear to her mouth. ‘What did you say?’
‘She’s enjoying her opioids. Probably best to not pay too much attention,’ the nice lady doctor was saying. Florrie couldn’t remember her name now.
‘Is she supposed to be enjoying them?’ Hamish was saying, concernedly, and the same doctor remarked matter-of-factly how it was, ‘Much better than the alternative: dizziness and puking.’
‘Who’s puking?’ Florrie tried to say, but she wasn’t sure if the words were making their way out of her head.
There’d been a period of complete blackness after that when she must have slept, the senseless bliss shattered by the sudden peculiar sensation of jarring awake in a strange place and realising she was drooling. She tried to lift a weak and wobbly hand to wipe her chin.
A fresh bloom of pain shocked all the way down her forearm as she realised with a sickly jolt that her hand was encased inside stiff bandages.
‘Here, let me.’
Hamish was very close indeed and dabbing at her mouth with a tissue. The shame! She tried to sit upright but the clinic revolved around her like this was a carnival ride. ‘Are you going to throw up?’ he said, propping a cardboard bowl under her chin.
‘No, I am not,’ she commanded her stomach, woozily. ‘Where are the doctors?’
The room was extremely warm and dark apart from a desk lamp. The world outside, a suggestion of itself through the slats of the blinds, was completely black.
‘Do you remember you fell and broke a wrist bone and sprained your thumb? The doctors gave you morphine?’
Bits of it came back to her now. ‘I… didn’t say anything weird, did I?’
Hamish seemed convincing enough when he told her she hadn’t, so she was satisfied.
But her mouth was dry and there was something stopping her moving her face on one side.
She lifted her hand, gingerly this time, so her fingertips, exposed at the end of the plaster cast, could feel along the edges of the tape above her eyebrow.
‘The doctor cleaned and bandaged your graze,’ Hamish told her.
She didn’t remember that part at all.
‘So, do you feel OK? That was a serious sleigh ride you took.’
‘Total yard sale,’ she croaked, surprised at her hoarseness when she tried to fake a laugh.
‘A what?’ His lips cracked into a sweet smile.
‘You know? When you leave your skis and poles all down the run, like you’re having a yard sale.’
‘How can you joke?’ he said, the wryest of laughs crackling in his voice. ‘I nearly died.’
‘No, I nearly died.’
All his humour evaporated. ‘I mean it. I was so afraid.’ He had his hand on his chest rubbing it like it hurt. The other hand reached for her plaster cast and cradled it gently. ‘I’m so sorry I made you ski today. This is my fault.’
She struggled to sit upright, not easy without the use of her hands, sending Hamish scrambling to support her shoulders and shift a pillow that must have been placed behind her when she was out cold.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes people fall.’ Her attempt at an easy shrug ended in her whole body seizing up stiffly. ‘Am I allowed to go home now?’
‘Where is home?’ he asked. ‘I don’t even know where you’re from.’
She’d meant she wanted to go back to the little mezzanine, but his question deserved an answer.
‘I… uh, I don’t really know where home is,’ she told him, and it was the absolute truth. Tears stung her eyes, wanting so much to fall after the shocks of this afternoon. She suddenly felt very sorry for herself.
‘Hey! It’s OK. Come here.’ Without prompting, Hamish pulled her in for a hug.
Someone had removed her jacket and jumper, she realised now; glad she couldn’t remember that part, because it must have hurt like crazy.
Hamish, so close to her now, was in his mesh ski underlayer, tight like skin and sheer black and honeycombed with a million little hexagons hinting at the lean muscle underneath.
He smelled good, of heat and expended adrenalin.
She tried not to think how she must smell as she let herself be held, her hands sticking out awkwardly behind his back.