Mary: I waited over 3 hours for ambulance after breaking my hip
DAME Mary Berry has revealed she had to wait three-and-a-half hours for an ambulance after breaking her hip.
The 86-year-old TV presenter underwent surgery and was admitted to the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading, for ten days after the accident in August.
Dame Mary told the Daily Mail’s Weekend magazine she was in her garden picking sweet peas when she tripped over some bricks and ‘went down really hard’.
She said she was ‘perfectly happy’ to wait for the emergency services, despite one of her feet ‘turning out’. Dame Mary, who now has a slight limp and is using a walking stick, told Frances Hardy: ‘I had a new knee a few years ago and I thought, “Oh, I’ve hurt my knee”.
‘I sat quite still. I’d encourage everyone to have a phone with them always, when they’re out dog-walking, crossing a field... with a phone you can always get help.’
She called her husband Paul, who was in the house watching cricket, joking that he didn’t pick up as ‘the cricket’s more important’.
Her daughter Annabel was at a tennis tournament so she phoned her son-in-law Dan, who arrived within ten minutes.
She said: ‘He saw me and said, “I’ll get an ambulance”. I said, “Oh, no, I’m fine”, but he overruled me. He rang for the ambulance and they said, “We’re very, very busy”. It was Sunday afternoon and there were lots of football injuries and whatever.’
The former Bake Off judge, whose two dogs Darcy and Freddie were at her side the whole time, continued: ‘We waited for three-and-a-half hours, until 6pm, and quite right too! I was perfectly happy.
‘There may have been a road accident. I quite understood that they were busy and Dan was caring for me. He kept me chatting.
‘When the ambulance arrived Dan told Paul. It was a shock for him, seeing me go off. They took me to the Royal Berkshire Hospital and they were so good at explaining. One foot was turning out and they said I’d broken my hip.’
Dame Mary, who had polio as a child, had surgery the next morning. ‘I was never nervous,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get a shiny new hip. They just repaired the old one and popped it back in. And oh, they were all lovely!’
The TV cook revealed that the nurses inundated her with pictures of their lemon drizzle cakes.
She used only paracetamol for pain relief and attributes her good recovery to ‘lots of physio’. She is trying to ‘walk in a straight line’ before returning to filming next month.