How long does it take a 67-year-old to realise she’s not 27 any more? Never, if the number of accidents and falls I have had in the past couple of years is anything to go by. I went 12 years in New York without so much as a scratch, yet in the UK and Europe, danger seems to lurk on every street corner.
Owing to my right eye being largely dysfunctional and awaiting an operation, my spatial awareness is extremely limited. In Penarth, where the streets are dark and the pavements badly maintained, I had my worst falls, including one spiralling down a dozen steps because the landlord had not heeded residents’ warnings about inadequate lighting and a largely out-of-order lift.
Six weeks ago, in Spain for a wedding, I fell up the single step in the Airbnb I was staying in. It had been marked with a yellow and black striped warning sticker, but only on the horizontal edge. Who knows whether I would still have fallen had the vertical edge also been marked, thereby making it clearer there was a right angle, but while my eyes were so focused on the zigzags, my brain didn’t send the warning message to my feet. I just saw fuzzy shapes and, in my disorientation, my left foot tripped on the concrete step that might as well have fallen on to it, for all the agony I was in.
For reasons too complicated and boring to go into, I wasn’t able to get it seen until days later when I found myself in A & E with a broken fifth metatarsal bone, strapped into a boot the size of Gibraltar and on crutches. In just 10 minutes, though, I was so adept at leaping around on them, I felt like signing up for the Paralympics.
Then, having to save my Schengen days (Brexit – the gift that keeps on taking), I went to the non-EU country of Bosnia and Herzegovina and this time tripped going down a step (unmarked) in another Airbnb in Sarajevo.
The hardest part in all this is the realisation of how truly alone I am. I’m used to fending for myself in everyday life as I’ve never known anything else, but when things go wrong, I am consumed by the fear of what the end of my life will look like.
No one to take me to hospital. No one to make me a cup of tea. No one to wipe the dribble from my chin. No one to wipe my arse, should it come to that. Heck, my shoulder’s so bad these days, I can barely do that myself.
I think back to the men I might have chosen to help me through all this. My first boyfriend, who was by far the kindest male I have ever met, but not right for me, who wanted to escape the small town of Bridgend in which I had grown up.
Nope.
The journalist who told me in Paris, in a wine bar by the Seine, that I was the funniest, smartest and most interesting woman he had ever met – he just didn’t fancy me (so much for the City of Love).
Nope, again.
The journalist who used to phone me with versions of his columns, arrive to read them to me again, even, on one occasion, dragging me out of bed when I was seriously sick. He was with someone else at the time and told me he “wanted to stay with her long enough to lose enough weight so she’d be attractive enough to meet someone else.”
NO NO NO NO NO!
So, I am not sitting pondering the loves I have lost. To be honest, in most cases, I feel I’ve dodged not so much a bullet as an AR15.
It’s not all about having a partner – and I know from many friends that they, too, can be hopeless in a crisis. I was blessed, during my incarceration, by the kindness of my friends Chrissie and Martin in Cardiff, with whom I had already arranged to stay before my accident in my never-ending quest to find cheap non-Schengen countries (I just can’t afford the UK) to stay until I could recoup some days back.
Their house is the one I sold to Chrissie and her first husband over 20 years ago, and I still love the huge kitchen I had put in. (Bulthaup – pay top dollar. You will never regret it. Just sayin’). Despite the glorious kitchen, I felt no attachment to the house, as they have transformed it into something more wonderful than I ever had the inclination to do, so at least I wasn’t sitting around moping about days long gone; also, these particular friends are a joy to be around and so, so kind.
But my life has become one long saga of sums, flow charts and lists, as my continual struggle with Brexit complications drags on. The stress has got to me big time, exacerbated by ongoing medical issues.
I often wish there was just someone there to take the pressure off. Even for just a day.
When I sat in the hospital waiting room, everyone had someone with them: a woman tenderly rubbing a man’s neck, looking helpless in the face of the pain he was clearly suffering; a man bringing in his very distressed friend in a wheelchair and doing all the necessary paperwork for him; a mother and daughter laughing; a father with his teenage daughter.
A waiting room is a lonely place when you’re alone.
Just me.
Me and my left foot.
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