The big fall

One wrong step, tip, slip, fall, and crack.

I lie helpless on the stone, looking at my arm in horror.

I instinctively unhooked it as I fell, lest my freshly received hip replacement pop out of place.

My leg is unharmed, but my elbow bone is apparently bulging out of place at my elbow.

Burning pain, weakness, dizziness, nausea.

I wish I could turn back the clock one second.

Compassionate people lean over me in horror, helping me up in terrible pain.

In the taxi, my arms swell with wind and my strength fades.

St. John's Hospital is on duty.

Saturday night. Hell itself. Hyeronimus Bosch live image.

Suffering, moaning people everywhere I look.

An hour to register.

Another hour before X-rays. Terribly painful as they adjust my arm for the scan, I nearly pass out.

They put me on a stretcher. The scrub boy takes his motorcycle withdrawal symptoms out on me, we
speed along at a hundred, brakes screeching and tyres burning as we swerve into the exam room, my
wounded arm sliding a millimetre past the doorjamb.

Good news: no fractures, just a dislocated elbow.

More good news: they're using a machine to put the bone back in place. I sigh, apparently they no
longer have the butchery methods to pull it back in.

After another hour's wait, I'm wheeled into the cast room. The 'machine', it turns out, is an ancient
inquisition torture device, the idea being to attach claws to the ends of my fingers, so that my arm is
attached to a pulley with a thirty-pound weight on the other end pulling my bones apart.

With tears in my eyes I scramble for an anaesthetic. Their hearts fall for me, and I am given a
lidocaine from the Hungarian State's meagre supply.

Then a doctor rushes in to say that my ulna (sing) bone is broken after all. Shakily. It moved.

Only the radiologist didn't notice.

Last minute. We have to use a different method. We have to operate.

But the elbow has to be repaired first. The old way. I've got two knuckle-dragging, heavyweight spurs
pulling a giant one on my broken, suspended arm. Today's the second reccy. It hurt. But it's in place.

Another x-ray, another run, another examiner, another doctor.

By the way, it wasn't the ulna that broke, it was the radius. We're getting closer to reality.

Tests, blood draws, chest X-ray, debriefing.

More blood tests. I don't have a vein anymore. Two failed attempts. A vessel bursts. My left hand is
purple.

I end up in some hospice, hours of old lady patients arguing with old lady nurses over nothing,
repeating the dialogue a thousand times.

Next to me lies a guy who is motorbiker. He's done the Budapest - Bamako rallie on dirt roads ten
times, now he's gone off at eighty in a corner on a training session, broken his shoulder.

At midnight the pleasure starts. They enter the operating theatre in the familiar green nightgown,
green sheets and green hairnet.

The young anaesthetist doctor is very kind, we change the world as he pushes the stuff into me.

Deep sedation. That's what I got away with at Carolina Hospital.

It was supposed to be a nerve block, but that's riskier now.

After the operation, the doctor says: I was thinking of Popey all along! Mr. Mezey must have eaten a
lot of spinach, he's got so much muscle, I could barely unpack his bones. I put together a metal tube
and screws, but I'll give it to him as a present, because I'm not taking it out!

Another hospice. Next to me is an old man, 74 years old, who fell at home, broke his leg, they are
going to operate, they put a catheter in him, but he keeps pulling it out and pissing in his bed.

At night, one of the nurses comes in with the rushing surgeon boy, who jumps on the old man's bed
and starts shouting angrily at him: 'You pissed yourself, you've caused yourself trouble, stop
shouting!

The nurse grabs his arms, the surgeon boy his broken legs and they throw him over to the next bed
to get the pissy, old sponge out from under him. I'm reminded of the Iraqi soldiers' prisoner torture
film.

Sunday morning a man comes in, a technical type, I thought he was going to fix my wrecked bed. But
he just runs past me and shouts: "Is it swollen? He's got a good word for the old man: "Don't pull the
catheter out! He asks the biker guy: What happened? He'll tell him. The man: That's the way you
want it! If you can't ride a motorcycle, don't ride a motorcycle. Then he squeezes his broken shoulder
and runs on, not even seeing the guy almost faint. I note here that there's no fever chart on the beds,
so no one knows what's wrong with anyone.

There's a man lying in the corner who's been hit by a car. It happened as he was walking his horse on
a treadmill, a motorcyclist started up beside him with an earth-shaking roar, and the horse jumped
and ran out into the road. He followed, trying to stop the traffic, but everyone was in a hurry, a car
swerved to the right, one to the left, and the third hit him.

Fortunately, he was not seriously hurt, no broken bones, just kept in for observation.

But while I was there, no one was watching him except us, his roommates. However, there was an
information error, the nurses thought he was going to operate and put a catheter in. He begged in
vain that he was in a lot of pain, but they waved him down and told him to stay still.

The 'technical" doctor - because he is the one doing the visit, his running around is the "visit" - asks
the nurse why the catheter? The nurse says with wide, wondering eyes, I have no idea, I don't
understand either!

Then get it out!

Immediately!

Two hours later they do.

The rider begs to be let home, he's fine, no doctor has looked at him for two days, but he has to look
after his sick old mother who lives alone.

Stay still, the doctor on duty will be here soon!

He's not coming. He's not coming all day. At five o'clock in the afternoon, the patient gets up, gets
dressed and walks out of the hospital.

It's become a scandal.

The nurse tells me to walk. I obey, grab my blood-draining jar with my left hand and take a long walk
in the beautiful garden of the 120-year-old, immaculate St John's Hospital. I admire the chapel and
the many old, tastefully designed buildings, and then take a long look at the army of rusty iron beds
that have been discarded in the garden over the past decades.

In the evening, I struggle a few more times with the complicated triad of miniature toilets,
interlocking doors and paperlessness of the lavatory. Conclude that the food is very good and that
the tea at St. John's is sweeter than at Caroline hospital, and then on Monday morning I am stripped
of my blood-clotting drains, given a final report, buy a peppy blue plaster and a sling, and take a taxi
out of John's.

I got my paid social security contributions back for a good while.

Mezey András