Séamas O'Reilly: On freak accidents, frailty — and the importance of showing concern
Seamas O'Reilly: he went for a morning run on his birthday. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan
If I have an abiding principle for my weekly columns, it’s to avoid becoming a ‘How it started/how it’s going’ meme. You know the kind of thing.
People screen-grabbing a previous headline of mine that says something ebullient and brash like “I have never flushed my toilet” alongside a later, more mournful offering like “What I now know about cholera will shock you”.
Sadly, this fate cannot be avoided forever, and this week my time might well be up.
For the “fitness kick” I spoke of undertaking just two columns ago has, well, kicked me back.
It was all going so well. I’d kept to the strictures of my eating plan (less bread, pasta and booze, more fish and vegetables) and the exercise I was willing to do (a near-daily 5K run in the park beside my house).
The result was a decent bit of weight loss and a fitter disposition.
Admittedly, the practical benefits of fitness to a sedentary man like myself are marginal at best, but I was certainly finding it easier to run after my kids, chase buses, and climb stairs, and was gradually adding to the 1.5 angles I can usually tolerate having my picture taken from.
And then came my birthday.
The morning I turned 39, with a smugness so potent it could likely be bottled and sold on the dark web, I rose from my stately lie-in and donned my running gear to take in my usual 5K in the frigid November air.
“Even on your birthday?” I imagined Sue Barker asking me, through tears of awe, while handing me my trophy at the BBC Sportsperson of the Year.
All seemed fine as I set off, but I was nearing the halfway point when I lost my footing.
There isn’t, unfortunately, a great story to tell from this point.
No swerving to avoid a runaway child or a villainous cyclist.
Nor even some explanatory hurdle like a dog mess or a dead rat — both of which I encounter relatively frequently on these runs — I simply stumbled for reasons I can’t explain, and came down to earth with an echoic clang.
My knees and face took the real brunt, along with the hands and wrists I’d stretched out to break my fall.
These automatic measures probably helped in the long run, but in the short term they merely provided the concrete pavement with a greater attack surface along which to drag its rough exterior.
The result was that my temple, chin and right wrist were each sanded for roughly two inches, leaving me shocked and slumped at the side of an overpass 2.5km from my house.
My phone had been badly smashed up and my hands — the left of which was now dripping with dark red blood — were too tremulous to navigate its unfamiliar screen.
I was, it turned out, mostly alright, barring quite a lot of pain and the aforementioned blood now trickling from a pin-prick-sized cut on my palm.
I cupped my hand on the walk home to hide my shame from passers-by, and had enough pooled between my fingers to make a sizeable black pudding by the time I neared my front door.
That walk was a reminder of several things.
Firstly, how frail the human body — OK, my human body – is when faced with the quotidian challenges of gently paced steps, lost footing, and a concrete path.
My second realisation was just how little anyone really looks at anyone.
Mortified that someone would fuss over me, I adopted a breezily upright gait and a neutral expression, shielding my bloodied hand from view. This achieved the desired effect but led, almost immediately, to the opposite emotional response within me: I found myself distantly offended that no one seemed to care.
Thirdly, I kept replaying the incident in my head and came to the unavoidable conclusion that I’d gotten off very lucky indeed.
It would have been better that I hadn’t fallen, of course, but given that I was running on a path beside a busy arterial road, mere metres away from hundreds of speeding cars, it could have been a lot, lot worse.
As I winced homeward, each of the exact ways in which it could have been worse came flooding, readily and helpfully, to mind; a tumble 2m to my left, say, causing an eight-car pile-up as vehicles swerved to avoid me; or, if traffic continued on its path undeterred by my prone body, a swift decapitation under the wheels of a passing bus.
Even without the spectre of vehicular murder, I had to admit that there was no real reason why my fall didn’t result in a broken ankle or leg, or didn’t propel me on to some rusty assemblage of tin cans and metal scrap — again, objects I have encountered on this path in plentiful quantities before — leaving me impaled through the throat by a decade-old, fly-tipped gatepost.
All such maudlin thoughts I kept to myself until I’d reached home to find my wife reassuringly aghast. She quickly sprang to the first aid kit with nurse-like aplomb.
Salves were applied and I showered enough that I could see, through departing dirt and grit, that I’d gotten off quite lightly, save for some pleasingly garish — but thankfully small — wounds on my face and hands.
Since it was my birthday, we had a wetland walk and pub lunch planned with friends, all of whom were as sympathetic as the strangers of London had forgotten to be. Best of all, each of them, having heard my tale of woe, said the same thing.
“You went for a morning run? On your birthday?”.
Yes, I said, smiling through the pain, like a soldier or a fireman, and practicing an acceptance speech in my head.
