Nobody tells you...
...that writing about how you long to sustain a minor injury so you can go on bed rest is inviting the universe to mess with you
Afew months ago, I set in motion a terrible series of events when I wrote in this very column about the irrational, yet strangely persistent fantasy I have about having a small accident that would require a short stint in the hospital or on the couch. In committing this admittedly ludicrous desire to the page, I unwittingly became the architect of my own downfall. I wished for a non-life-threatening injury and I got it. And oh, how the gods laughed.
For anyone who might have missed the previous column, I was basically relating how myself and many of my friends of a similar age speak longingly about hospitalisation for a minor injury. Don’t be alarmed by this admission — it’s not a self-destructive impulse but rather a desperate bid for a bit of a life reprieve. Studies have shown — somewhat reassuringly in a “thank God it’s not just me” way — that from the age of 35 to 45 we can expect to have the busiest and most demanding decade of our lives. I am only halfway through that decade and can attest that, at least anecdotally, these findings definitely feel true.
Between housework, life admin, jobs and kids, most of us in this life stage are doing well if we can wrest back even just an hour of time a day to ourselves. Most of the time, I’m too catatonic during this hour to do much of anything beyond gaze at my phone and murmur unintelligibly at my husband. Obviously assume that I am making all the usual caveats here about how lucky I am. (Sidenote: You can’t even complain in peace anymore without someone popping out of the bushes to remind you that “at least you have a life to complain about!”. I mean… they’re not wrong but also, we’re all adults here. We don’t need 90 qualifiers just to have a minor moan about life, do we?)
Some weeks after that article published, I of course broke two ribs. And let me tell you, my non-life-threatening minor injury was not the restful experience I thought it was gonna be. For starters, I hadn’t taken into account how the resting due to injury would be interfered with by the pain from said injury. Broken ribs are the worst. I could not get comfortable. But then I remembered that all injuries hurt and reflected once more on the folly of my injury fantasies. “Foolish mortal,” the gods jeered from above as I tried to sneeze without crying and attempted to avoid laughing altogether.
For the first few days of having broken ribs, I was abroad and not in a position to get medical attention. I was soldiering on, aided by over-the-counter pain meds, generally feeling like I wasn’t really permitted to lean into my injury until I had the prognosis from a cardcarrying doctor. I also felt my injury wasn’t being received with the appropriate levels of pity.
Everything I’d looked up online seemed to suggest that broken ribs couldn’t really be remedied with anything other than time. Still, I ploughed on with dragging myself to the hospital. I thought if they gave me an x-ray or a prescription for an exciting pain medication, it would lend my plight some legitimacy in the uncaring eyes of my family. And wouldn’t you know it, the doctor said there was no point in x-raying me and just repeated nearly verbatim what the internet had said: “all you can do is shut up and put up, you silly b**ch” — or words to that effect.
I was gutted that I wouldn’t be strapped up or getting some other indicator of my malady. How would anyone know to feel sorry for me??? You may remember in the original Mild Injury Daydream I was rooting for two sprained wrists, reasoning that if it was only one I would be forced to “soldier on”, whereas with two I would be untouchable. No making school lunches or getting unwilling, borderline rabid children into clothes they don’t want to put on.
Sadly, my mild injury was too invisible for anyone in my family to summon a s**t to give about it. Tragic. I actually took the admittedly unhinged step of looking online to see if there were any forums where people would give you sympathy, no questions asked. Can confirm there is not, though I did discover that there’s a real-life, bricks and mortar sympathy dispensary in every neighbourhood in the country: the pharmacy. If you need a little TLC, get yourself down to your local pharmacy where you will find other mildly injured people just dying to commiserate with you. Now, it is a quid pro quo situation in that you will have to listen to their woes, but it’s worth it.