Terry Prone: Broken ribs on holiday? There are worse things that could happen

‘Given a choice between queuing in tropical heat for a rollercoaster while having to be nice to some unfortunate dressed as Mickey Mouse, I’d go with the broken ribs,’ writes our columnist. Picture: Julio Aguilar/Getty Images

Say what you will about the current state of America, but some eternal verities remain.

One of them is that the US makes great washing machines. Which is maybe why my friends who have lent me their house have located their machine in the utility room on an elevation. Right and proper; it has its very own step.

Having loaded the machine with T-shirts and set it to do with its business, I turn to exit, forgetting the step and finding myself briefly airborne as a result.

I come down with my midsection on the right-hand side impaled, more or less, on the rim of a barrel. The pain is like sheet lightning in its overwhelming, blinding agony.

When it eventually dies back to a grumbling thunder, I find that I am reverently kneeling, my arms around the barrel. Somewhere between a cooper and a tree hugger.

Getting to my feet is interesting, as is walking. Not to mention breathing in and out. But I figure that, left to itself, the injury will resolve and all will be well. 

The next 36 hours prove me SO wrong. It doesn’t resolve.

Now, it could be worse, according to Dr Google, who maintains that, had I introduced the edge of the barrel to the other side of my mid-section, I would now have a splintered spleen and be in hospital. (This is why God gave us travel insurance.)

However, although my spleen is fine, thank you for asking, the other side is so painful that even trying to turn over in the bed produces an involuntary, high-volume pain bellow akin to hippos mating. (Now, to be honest, I haven’t witnessed hippos mating, but this noise doesn’t resemble anything else, so let’s stick with hippo sex.)

Even getting into the bed is a problem. My house-lending friends, for some reason, have a tall bed. Not saying you’d need oxygen to get to the summit, but grappling hooks would be good — and that’s when things are normal.

When you’ve been stabbed by a utility-room barrel, this bed makes Mount Everest look like a hill. The third time I slide down to base camp, I cry a little, which is pointless. You need witnesses for a good cry, so I give up, make one last attempt and get there, only to remember I haven’t turned the light off.

Having survived a night in a room as brightly lit as an operating theatre and with similar sound effects, the next day I go to a local clinic where they do paperwork. They also do medicine, but that comes after the paperwork. Citizenship and a free home would require less bureaucracy.

When they ask me for next of kin, I say my son.

They want to know his birth date, which floors me for two reasons. One, I can’t see its relevance. Two, I can’t remember it. 

I mean, I was there at the time and all, but although I’m good for the day and month, the year is a mystery to me. I tell them I’ll guess and they look bothered but go with it, telling me that Dr Bob will see me soon. Then they abandon me in a room on my own.

Dr Bob arrives, sits down, and does more paperwork, inviting me to tell my story. The barrel intrigues him. I get the impression he doesn’t see that many patients grievously wounded by a static barrel.

What kind of barrel was it, he wants to know. I tell him, somewhat tersely, that I hadn’t thought to interrogate the brand identity of the barrel. He finds this funny. He then puts me on one of those paper-covered beds and starts to examine me. This hurt? No. This? No. This? Definitely no. How about this?

I rise two feet off the bed and do the hippo mating noise. "Ah," the doctor says and gently probes the problem area. I have broken ribs. He takes my hand and guides my fingers to the point of breakage. Can I feel the bones clicking when I breathe? Yes I can, I tell him. 

This is great, I add, explaining that few things match the satisfaction of having an amateur diagnosis confirmed.

 Especially when the professional diagnosis proves you’re not imagining things or making a big issue out of a minor bruise.

This is true, he says, but if I would feel better with an X-ray, he can arrange that. (Let me show you my holiday snaps — see this picture of my damaged rib cage?)

I wave aside an X-ray. Being able to feel my own ribs clicking is more fun. On the other hand, says Dr Bob, there’s no treatment for broken ribs.

Used to be, they’d tape you up with bandages to immobilise the ribs, but they found this action also immobilised the lungs, which meant you couldn’t breathe properly, which led to infections, pneumonia, and fill in the rest yourself.

He tells me he will give me narcotics unless I have a prior problem, which I assume to mean addiction, which I don’t have.

He says no, that wasn’t his concern, he just wanted to check if I get adverse results like throwing up, which I don’t remember in any previous narcotic use.

If you ask me why I seem so casually well acquainted with narcotics, I will tell you that all my life I have been accident-prone, which has led to dozens of irritating people making a play on my name, each convinced nobody ever did so before.

Because I have spent my life falling, crashing, concussing, and dislocating, I have done the Sacklers some service in my time.

I am to take one of the pills prescribed by Dr Bob at bedtime for each of the six following nights, after which the acute pain of healing may have died down a bit. He then demonstrates a breathing exercise involving a pillow designed to keep the lungs functioning.

He describes it as “splinting” with the pillow, which I don’t understand at all, since splints, to me, are planks broken from a door in old Westerns for strapping a cowboy’s broken leg.

The narcotic does nothing to mitigate the pain, so the hippo vocalising happens repeatedly that night. 

It does, however, give me a philosophical, even joyous equanimity, like pain was an unrelatable character in a novel — Olive Kitteridge, for example — who you find endearing in spite of yourself. I decide the following day I’ll go with ibuprofen while saving the narcotics and taking them home after the holiday. You never know the day nor the hour.

When I mention the ribs in an email to the office, people tell me it’s a horrible thing to happen on holiday. 

I don’t know. Given a choice between queuing in tropical heat for a rollercoaster while having to be nice to some unfortunate dressed as Mickey Mouse, I’d go with the broken ribs.