They told me my sun habit would cost me; I never imagined it’d be like this
The most expensive afternoon of my life actually begins two days earlier, when a bag of sun cream falls on my head. The irony of this is not lost on me: for years, people have warned me that my passion for sunbathing will most likely kill me, but I don’t think anyone imagined it might end like this.
SPF might not sound like a particularly dangerous weapon, but when there are 10 bottles of the stuff, in varying states of fullness, in a bag that you’d “put away” for the winter on the top shelf of the wardrobe just the previous day, and when that bag is dislodged by the sliding door while you’re reaching for a pair of shoes on the bottom shelf — then trust me when I tell you it packs quite a punch. Also, it’s that bit of my head that you really don’t want to hit — the relatively fragile bit at the temple — though I try not to dwell on that while I run through the important checklist that follows the ouch.
But I’m not dazed and I don’t feel nauseous so I just do a lot of sighing and get on with my day, which is Wednesday and the president is Michael D Higgins.
He’s still president on Friday morning, but now I feel quite dizzy and I have a definite headache, something I almost never get. I hum and haw and look at the internet, which is always an excellent idea whenever your body isn’t behaving as it should. I’m almost sure I’m fine — and in any case the injury was two days ago — but I decide to phone the VHI Nurseline so that a person who knows stuff can reassure me. Only she says I need to get myself to A&E. I can’t face Tallaght, so I phone the Beacon, who I know do a triage assessment over the phone. And because I still fundamentally think I’m fine, I’m kind of hoping the triage nurse there will tell me not to bother. Only he asks me how far away I am from the hospital and if I can get there in half an hour. He warns me not to drive — the first good news I’ve heard all day — so I hastily cadge a lift and off I go.
On my way out the door I pick up a letter in the porch from the pet insurers telling me that they’re not going to pay for The Cat’s asthma treatment which means I won’t be getting back the several hundred euros I’ve paid out for her, which would probably be a bigger blow if I hadn’t been hit on the head by a bag of sun cream. My phone battery is almost depleted — I had grabbed my charger as I raced out of the house — and as soon as I’m ensconced in a cubicle, I look for somewhere to plug it in. There’s a bank of sockets high above the bed and I choose the last one, in case the others are needed for some medical intervention, and I leave the phone on the shelf below it, which I can tell is quite slanted but don’t really think that through.
Three minutes later, the phone I bought in January that I immediately dropped down the toilet and then immediately dropped on the driveway after it was repaired smashes to the floor from roughly the same height as the bag of sun cream had two days earlier.
Not only does it fall quite spectacularly apart, it takes the end of the charger with it, so now I need a new iPhone, a new charger, I’m out of pocket for The Cat’s medicine, and I’m on the clock at the hospital. Under the circumstances, when the doctor says I need a CT scan, I briefly consider telling him I’ll take my chances. But he’s not really suggesting that it might be optional so I obediently trip down to radiology where the scanner reads my brain while I try to read the face of the radiographer.
The doctor will have the results in half an hour, she says — so of course, when that’s stretching closer to an hour, I decide that I was wrong about being fine and I am actually finished and somewhere in the bowels of A&E, the doctor is trying to pluck up the courage to tell me.
But I am fine. I leave with nothing to show for my day apart from a hospital bill for €560 and another €360 bill for a new phone. I have essentially dropped a grand on nothing. People were right: all that sunbathing comes at a hell of a cost.