A NEW PLAN - MONDAY 21ST JULY - DORDRECHT

This morning we sat down quietly and mapped out a plan of roughly where we would go, how we would get there and when we would do it.   

This was a mistake.

We even went as far as giving a couple of people a loose idea of when we might see them along our way, and, with a plan as firmly made as ever it was, we set off happily to explore whatever Dordrecht could offer.  Barely half an hour into our morning stroll, we’d seen the big church but not taken any photos, been past the town hall, and had just admired the library, when one of us decided that the road seemed like a great place to rest for a bit. 

It seems she’d taken a slight depression in the paving to be something other than a slight depression, had rolled her ankle and fallen, using her previously uninjured foot to break her fall.   

This in retrospect was also a mistake.  

Downtown Dordrecht on a Monday morning is barely more alive than it is on Sunday morning yet a couple of kindly souls arrived from nowhere, helped us to the cafe across the road, organised ice and generally made a splendid fuss.

After not very much time at all, the barely injured (relatively) ankle was looking a little swollen despite the ice, while the other foot even to the untrained eye looked like a bit of a basket case.  The fact that the front half of it was pointing in a different direction to the back half was possibly a clue.

Thanks to the miracle of the modern gig economy, a friendly Uber driver had us to the hospital lickety split, where a bystander fetched a wheelchair, the admissions people pulled every required string to expedite our passage through the big electric door, and a young nurse who might have been good looking enough in a stereotypical kind of way to play the part of a doctor in a mini series, suggested the foot looked like a bit of a basket case, arranged for some x-rays and expedited our way through to see a doctor.

The bright young doctor who might  in a few more years be old enough to play a female Doogie Houser in the next series, offered hope but thought CT scans would be advisable in case it was actually a basket case.  

Happily the orthopaedic surgeon, saw hope in those scans, and pronounced that with a few screws and a bit of metal, it will probably be starting to look a bit more like a foot again before we know it.

This week, it’s plaster and crutches while we wait till the swelling subsides.  Next week we’ll see if she’s good to her word.   In the meantime, we’re not making any more plans!