Electric Quaker II

“I’m sorry…

… but we are currently dealing with an unusually high volume of pain, and are unable to deal with your information at present. Please listen to this litany of swearing and nervousness, and we will deal with your message as soon as possible.”

Wassat, then?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the message that greeted my elbow yesterday afternoon, after I fell, whilst sober, down the stairs.

It really hurt.

I’m still not exactly sure what happened, but the sequence of events was more or less as follows:

1. Begin descent of stairs
2. Crack head, hard, on corner of study wall, where it overhangs the stairwell. Swear.
3. Legs continue to move forwards whilst skull remains firmly arrested, embedded on aforementioned corner of wall. In consequence, legs swing upwards, pivoting around my waist, until gravity kicks in.
4. Hover in air, exactly parallel to stairs, for approximately one second, as per ‘Statutory Scenes in Cartoon Violence Treaty, 1956’
5. Drop two feet flat onto the stairs, where corner of sixth stair up catches me firmly under shoulder blades, winding me awfully. Shout.
6. Slither-and-bump down remaining stairs, shouting “ouch” every second or so.
7. Come to rest in heap at foot of stairs. Struggle into sitting position, feeling very winded and with an aching head. Say “fuck” very distinctly.
8. Put hand on bruise on head, as Ruth and Caro & Jerry run over looking worried. Assure them no real harm done.
9. Remove hand from head, causing horrified gasps from everyone who can see said hand. Trickle of blood chooses this moment to run down forehead and into eye.

Presently, after Jerry had been trying to run my head under the shower for a while, and the pain from the gash in my scalp had temporarily overwhelmed the ache in my back (now returned) I realised that my elbow was killing me, and I’d got a two-inch-square graze of carpet burn, which still hurts now. My head still hurts, too, of course, and is in a rotten state which currently prevents me from either combing my hair or otherwise trying to wash the blood out of it, because any such attempt will pull the cut open again, and I’ll go back to looking like something out of a cheap horror flick.

What was bizarre, though, is that for most of yesterday (indeed, until mid-morning today, when I realised that my back really does hurt quite a lot – not, in itself, that surprising since I effectively battered it with a 13-14 stone lump of wood) my grazed elbow was by far the most painful (and annoying) part of the whole catalogue of injuries, and yet my nervous system totally ignored it jumping up and down saying “Hello? I’ve got grazed, and it really hurts!” for a good five or ten minutes, whilst it dealt with things like my skull saying “Ow, I’ve got bashed, and I’ve split the skin, and there’s lots of blood and pain and things.”

In many ways, this shows a commendable ability to prioritise messages on the part of my brain. It also makes it very annoying that, having finally bothered to take a message from my whiny elbow, it kept taking the message constantly for the rest of the day, long after any risk of further nasty grazing had passed…

And you have no idea how much my head now itches. Still, I’m not going to touch it, or I’ll go seeping blood over everything again…