Lady Adventure

Never a Dull Moment

I woke up to a face-slapping.
I was lying on my back, with my husband kneeling over me, gently slapping my cheeks.
"I'm calling an ambulance," he said.
I looked up at the ceiling and saw the horrid faux-wood ceiling tiles of our hall. Why wasn't I in bed? Why was I lying in the hall? And why was my husband slapping my face like an 80s' soap opera diva?

All of these are good questions and can be answered with two words: stomach flu. Despite my rabid disinfecting, I picked up my husband's bug - except mine manifested itself in a series of fainting fits. On the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I fainted. I woke up briefly and found myself amidst a pile of screws, nails and rawl-plugs that I must have pulled off the shelf where we keep our DIY stuff as I fell.
"Crikey," I thought when I came to, "This must be one of those really weird interpretive dreams, where you find yourself surrounded by all kinds of strange objects that have a Freudian meaning. What's up with the nails? What do the screws mean? How do I interpret rawl plugs, for crying out loud?"
After a couple of seconds, when nothing else happened - no flying frogs in rubber boots, no guest appearances by deceased family members - I realised that it was unpleasantly real, so I called out for the Gingerbread Husband ... and the next thing I remember was being woken by a panicked husband who was threatening to call an ambulance.

"Can you feel your legs?" he kept asking, and I wriggled my toes to show I could. In fact, I was strangely proud of the fact that I was wriggling them like a pianist doing the scales - doh, ray, mi, fa, so, la, ti, doh! - but he wouldn't acknowledge my toe-wriggling prowess, he just saying, "We have to get you to the emergency room!" I convinced him not to drag me out in the snow in the middle of the night to the ER, instead I was allowed go back to bed. The next day I spent 5 hours in the ER waiting to have my toes x-rayed - in falling, I not only emptied the DIY shelf, I also scratched my neck (?) and stubbed two toes so badly that they looked broken (they're not, but the pain I am to experience is equal to a fracture, said the ER doctor with some grim satisfaction.)

Anyway, all's well that ends well - however, five hours in the emergency room with stomach flu and suspected broken toes will not count as the highlights of 2010. But we got home and made tea and had a supper of toast and honey - and all was right with the world. Then the Gingerbread Husband (who'd had a tremendous shock: he found me at the bottom of the stairs and thought by the way I was lying that I'd fallen down the stairs and broken my neck), lay down on the floor to recreate the astonishing angles at which he found my limbs akimbo
... and I promptly fainted again.
I probably need a day or two in bed.