Morphine or Orphean?

No contest really. I would have loved to see an Orphean, of course, but this weekend I really needed the morphine rather more. Turns out that a broken collarbone gets a lot more painful after they operate on it. Surprisingly so compared to when I wrote my immediate post-break post, at which time I convinced myself it wasn't that big a deal. Hence the surgeon sending me home with a bottle of the hard stuff, a 5ml dose of which, as well as numbing the pain, makes staying awake and going out pretty much unthinkable. So much so that I couldn't even accept one of several kind offers of a lift to Wales to twitch the Orphean Warbler which turned up with gripping predictability no sooner than I was immobilised.

So as well as coming to terms with the end of my nascent career as a stunt-scooter ace, I'm also getting used to the idea of not carrying heavy optics around for a while. Unfortunately wielding them is not among the recommended recovery therapies. I've tried training children to hold the lens, but there's just too much camera shake. So the six weeks which lie ahead with one arm in a sling are going to be seriously restrictive, and I suppose I'd just better get used to it.

All this said it's been a positive brush with the NHS. Since a bout of procreation early in the century requiring regular hospital visits, we haven't had much call to use it in recent year but when you really need it, you're certainly glad of it. OK the food wasn't up to much and even with morphine I struggled to sleep with Elephant Man snoring on one side and Rowley Birkin with Tourette's on the other, involuntarily hurling abuse at the staff as he was. But the bits which mattered - like not waiting hours in A&E with busted bones, and the part which involved scalpels - I can't fault. Best of all it was all free, though as a self-imposed injury, I felt I should have paid some kind of one-off charge as a token gesture of my appreciation. A Pratfall Tax, if you will.

Not going out is already doing my head in, but on the upside the medics have made clear I should also avoid hoovering, ironing and tidying up for the next couple of months, and camping until summer 2016 at the earliest. It's true, I have a note.


Won't be busting any moves on this any time soon either