How odd. I’ve had a letter today from the hospital in St Malo that treated me last weekend. It is short and to-the-point.
Radiographie de la cheville gauche face et profil et pied gauche face et profil:
RESULTATS:
Absence de lésion osseuse traumatique radiologiquement décelable sur les incidences réalisées ce jour.
Beg pardon? Now, my grasp of French is rudimentary to say the least (“schoolboy” would be a generous term and possibly an insult to most schoolboy students of the language), but the word “absence” does tend to leap out of the page. Google Translate comes to my aid and tells me that the radiography did not reveal a lesion on the bone. So why exactly am in a cast and on crutches, then?
Clearly, I’ve done a lot of damage to my left foot area. I must have stretched and pulled every muscle, tendon and bit of meaty gristle down there. It swelled up a fair bit (although, by everyone’s admission, not by a massive amount) and was very sore whenever I put weight on it. But have I actually done any damage to the bone? There was much discussion at the local hospital here in Blighty when I rocked up with my cast and my French x-ray transparencies because the damage is far from clear. I think I can see the ghost of the (tiny) chip on the image in the area where my French doctor said it was, but this new letter is signed by a different doctor. Was the original doctor imagining things?
I’m booked into the local fracture clinic for first thing on Wednesday morning. I’m going to ask them to review the evidence and to take a new set of x-rays so we can be sure what has taken place – my guess is that they will want to do that anyway. I’m trying not to get my hopes up too high, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I have only damaged muscle and that, with a bit of strapping, rest and physiotherapy, I can be back up and running, or walking at least, as soon as possible.