12th September – Monday – Footnote

Well that, to quote both Tony Hancock and, oddly enough as she couldn’t stand him, my grandmother, has put the mockers on that!

When last we saw out Disappearing Hero, he was hobbling upstairs to take a long hot soak in a bath to try and soothe the significantly bruised big toe he sustained falling down while trying to take a romantic Moonlit stroll the night before, right?

Well, I don’t know what to tell you – the heat didn’t help, except to bring out the aubergine hue even more and help turn the toenail blacker quicker.

Now, you remember Gill and Paul, our windows to the worlds of Solva and St David’s? Well their daughter Philippa’s a nurse, and as luck would have it, she arrived in Amroth for a week yesterday. Rather than calling my mother and necessarily cutting our holiday short, we figured we’d let Philippa take a look at the toe first. She looked at it, said ow, and decided “Hmm...probably wouldn’t hurt to get it x-rayed.”

There followed about three or four hours at Withybushe Hospital, Haverfordwest. Got myself a pair of x-rays. I asked the radiologist how they looked. He put his head on one side.

“I’m glad they’re yours, not mine...” he decided.

Eventually, I got called for a meeting with Dr Steve Fielding. He’d only been there a couple of days, and was cheerful-chubby, bearded and generally an optimistic, positive sort of guy. He showed me the x-rays. “What we look for,” he said, “is a break in the white line around the outside of the bone. Can you see any breaks?”

“No,” I said, just as d said “Oh yeah.”

I blinked.

“Really?” I said. She nodded. I stared at the slides. The one on the left seemed perfectly normal to me.

“Oh,” I said, looking at the profile shot on the right. “Is that...supposed to do that?”

“Nope,” said Steve cheerfully.

In the final digit of the toe, there was a chunk snapped off. It looked like a spearhead or a stealth plane.

“That there has snapped and is digging into the cartilage and the tissue underneath,” said Steve, still cheerfully.

“Ah.”

“So...” I wanted to clarify...”It’s broken then?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen much worse mind...”

“Well...” I said, not really sure how to respond. “That’s good then.”

“On the upside, it means you were right to come in,” he said. This was both true and actually helpful – Gill and Philippa had had their evening decimated, and had come and sat with us for all those hours – if it had turned out I was just being a wuss-ass, I’d have been thrilled but also, in a deeper analysis, a little guilty for ruining their night for nothing.

“Now,” he said, “what to do about this? Not much, really. I can bind up the toes, and then basically, you have to stay off the toe for at least two weeks, after which you might want to start re-integrating it into your walk. Six weeks or so, it’ll heal itself.”

Six weeks...!

“Erm...” I said. “I’m on this self-governing weightloss regime. It’s mainly about walking longish distances, and riding an exercise bike...”

He chuckled.

“Well I tell you what my friend: if you can do either of those without putting pressure on the foot, good luck to you. Me, I don’t think it’s possible...”

I was crushed.

What with one thing and another (mainly the one thing and another on the end of my various legs), I haven’t done anywhere near the amount of walking on this holiday I’d intended to, and was counting on getting back to London and my normal regime of biking and walking and eating oh my.

Six weeks. Plus these two weeks away from the weigh-in and the routine. Eight weeks, or two months.

So I decided – you know what, this was gonna be an experiment from March 1^st to March 1^st. The occasional week off with injuries is one thing, and I’ve had more than my fair share already this year – bloody blisters! – but six to eight weeks out of the routine is not really fair. So now, the Disappearing Man, Phase One, will run from March 1^st 2011 – May 1^st 2012.

Whaddaya mean, I can’t do that? My experiment, my rules, you wanna argue with me, break your toe!

Thing is, no sooner had I made that decision than the insidious little voice began in the back of my head. “Ooh – got some weeks off? Mmmm....iccccceecreaaaammmm.....”

Thing is, these are not weeks off – I’ll have to be inventive, that’s all – eat less, finally break out the weights, take to ordinary exercises like sit-ups and the like...yeah, that’s what I’ll have to do...

(Sigh).

Scuse me, got a couch to make an ass-print in, and a toe to put up. Blood was 5.4 this morning by the way...