unsafe at any height

How many times have you ripped the packaging from your exciting new gadget and immediately thrown out the enclosed safety notice, doubtless muttering some smug comment about health and safety gone mad?  The cynics will tell you that it is all to do with insurance, against idiots out to make an quick buck from cutting their finger on that new craft knife, but if you take a trip down to the fracture clinic you will see the other side of it: row up on fed up row of dejected souls, appendages plastered, awaiting the indignity of yet another X ray.

Each year thousands of fracture cases are admitted to every casualty department in the country, each with their own little sob story about how it wasn’t their fault and how it was all such an incredibly freak accident. Well last year I was one of these victims, sent out with instructions from on high to prune the unprunable bush, when all I wanted to do was paint the garage door.

It began innocently enough, the retrieval of rusting step ladders from the shed, complete with cobwebs, the hiring of some vicious long handled tree pruners… what could possibly go wrong?  If there ever was a safety notice on the step ladders it had long since met its maker; (and if the warning had still been in place it would naturally have been ignored).

The bush in question was, and remains, an evil twelve foot pyracantha, sulking at the top of the garden like a monstrous sea urchin.  The obvious approach was to balance on top of the steps and reach across with the pruners.  No problem with that, until one of the legs of the steps unexpectedly sank three inches into the earth.  The whole thing tilted, its centre of gravity shifted from safe to critical, and the resulting instability led to an immediate and total collapse, with me perched six feet up in a state of bafflement. 

I went down like the hand of a clock; it would have looked quite amusing to an onlooker but I was fated to experience the event alone.  As the earth moved beneath my feet instinct kicked in and there was just time to raise a hand to protect my head before I reached ground level, at something like Mach two.  My head was saved but my wrist had come down onto something hard, probably a stone, and was obviously broken.  In fact my hand had stopped when it reached the ground but my arm continued earthward for another half inch, resulting in a gruesome scoop in my wrist.

I went round to a neighbour, who took me down to casualty, where X rays confirmed fractures to the radius and a peanut sized bone in the wrist called the scaphoid.  I went home the following day with three tent pegs drilled into my arm and a plaster cast up to my elbow.  The surgeon warned me not to put any pressure on the dressing (as if) and to return in two months. 

The seven little bones that make up the human wrist appear as a random collection of oddly shaped nodules.  Each one is joined to its neighbours by thick slabs of cartilage and the whole thing is wrapped in swathes of blanket-like ligaments; factor in the wiring for the opposable thumb and you have the most complicated joint in the body.

There is, of course, nothing random about anything in the human skeleton: the wrist joint simply represents the cutting edge of evolution, each bone having developed over millennia to perform its own mysterious role, enabling the tricky three dimensional movements necessary to zap the remote or shake a martini.  Tendons, nerves and arteries dive through this maze and into the hand through a cunning channel called the carpal tunnel.  In diagrams it looks like a spruced up Clapham Junction and is involved in severe conditions like repetitive strain injury (keyboard operators) and vibration white finger (men using great big drills).  Both are caused when the tendons become inflamed within their bony confines

So, after eight weeks the plaster came off, the pins came out and the physiotherapy began.  The problem is that after all this time the joints and ligaments seize up and muscles shrivel away to nothing.  Cranking things up again is very painful and takes ages; in fact it is worse than the surgery!  I was invited by the pretty therapist to try holding an inflated balloon with two hands (I sniggered, and then wept) or to position my hands in a praying position (touchingly appropriate, I wept again).  Only after three months of this humiliation did life return vaguely to normal, with full recovery taking well over a year!  Now my wrist is like a piece of repaired pottery:  everything looks about right but things will never work quite as well as before.

My only trophies from this miserable saga are three little scars on my wrist and a discharge note from the surgeon saying “patient fell off stepladder”.  The last thing he said to me was “arthritis will be an absolute certainty” so at least he had a sense of humour!  The one good thing to come out of this is a new set of step ladders, in swish aluminium and sporting big red warnings down the side, all about what not to do. 

So, dear reader, tread carefully up there, because once you leave ground level you will find yourself at the mercy of gravity, and when things go wrong there won’t be time to read the instructions.  And believe me, it will hurt!