Read Online Noisy at the Wrong Times by Michael Volpe - Free Book Online Page B

recall the day they resorted to traction. They were baffled by my ailment and the extent of my pain. Standing around my bed in a huddle one morning, the doctors discussed many possible options and treatments, but one thing I latched onto was traction – strapping my leg and tying a weight to my foot in order to extend and stretch it. To me it seemed like the most concrete idea they‘d had because it was practical, obvious and tangible. They wandered off to make some decisions, and I began to wail at the nurses that I wanted, must have, just
had
to go into traction. I cried and cried with the pain, and a poor cleaner, a gentle Jamaican woman, tried to comfort and reassure me, eventually dissolving into tears alongside me as she did so. We were quite a sight, and when she could take no more of my pleading, bawling and snivelling she marched off to the nurse’s station on my behalf to demand that I be put into traction.
    A little later, two nurses, armed with a roll of sticky plaster,some weights and a pulley, performed the duty that in my mind had been demanded and achieved by that lovely cleaning woman. She had got it done, nobody else. And she remains a clear memory for me, that soft compassionate lady whose name I never knew; another of those small but hugely significant people or moments in the lives of certain children that pass by in a fleeting second, yet are burned into their consciousness. Many years later, at the birth of my daughter, that cleaner sprang straight back into my mind as the Jamaican midwife handed the baby to her weeping father with the words, “Here you go bwoy wonder!”
    It was the morning after the installation of the pulley and weights that Mum had come into the ward to find me lying, blissfully asleep, on my side, the side of the leg that had been so excruciatingly painful to the merest touch the day before. The mystery had been solved. It had only been a trapped nerve, and so she wept; relieved that from that day forward her mind would no longer be suffused with the worry of what might be wrong with me.
    Putting me into traction solved the leg problem, and antibiotics cleared up the chest infection but the sunstroke had struck me quite hard. They wanted to keep me in so that my leg could strengthen and to check there would be no reccurrence. I was out of traction after a few days, but I would spend a further fortnight in the ward. Two weeks in hospital turned out to be quite a bit of fun and needing a wheelchair introduced a unique opportunity for mischief. I took the chance with relish and crashed my way around the hospital with a boy whose entire bottom half was encased in plaster of Paris. He was on his belly on a little trolley, and together we caused chaos. His affliction, which made mine look like no more than a verucca, did nothing to prevent his mobility or potential for bedlam. In fact, his arms could propel him downthe long corridors at giddy speed; with his legs protruding dead straight behind him and his arms waving furiously beside him, he looked like a lobster on amphetamine. He’d cry at night when his legs were aching, but he was full of beans during the daytime and even cheekier to the nurses than I was.
    By the time I left the ward to go home, I was walking normally. I went to the bedside of my new friend who had fallen quiet as Mum helped me pack up my things for the discharge. He lay there exhausted from the effort of getting up and under his covers, which he always insisted on doing without help. I felt strangely guilty for being able to walk again. We had shared the same inability to use our legs for a short while, but he had been living with it for most of his life. I don’t think he minded that I had elevated my own minor ailment to the level of his, but I think he enjoyed the company for that couple of weeks. As I said my farewells tearfully, he smiled.
    “Have a good time at that school, wontcha?” he urged.
    “Yeah, I will. I’ll come and see you before I go,”