Why I’m the worst wife on the planet.

It started just before Christmas. My adorable little neighbors came over to help make gingerbread houses while their parents took care of top-secret Santa stuff.

Their realistic snow statements gave my little dog an idea. Despite the fact that it was pouring down a mixture of rain and sleet, I headed outside with her. Two steps into the garden, she saw something that urgently needed investigating, and the next thing I knew one foot was sliding in front of me while the other attempted to go in the opposite direction.

Events of the next few seconds are a bit blurred, but when I took stock, I noticed my right knee was turned in a direction it had never willingly attempted before. I lay on my back in several inches of freezing mud and thought about life. On the one hand, if I never moved again, I might be okay (except for the whole freezing to death thing). On the other hand, I had two young children waiting inside, and I was pretty sure they would gleefully be adding little frosted corpses to their snowscapes in my honor.

I rolled over and attempted to get to my feet. One leg worked. The other… didn’t. I crawled inside, the dog solicitously hovering by my side to lick my face. Inside, my two young guests were in awe of the amount of mud that entered with me. I’m pretty sure next year’s gingerpersons will include a mud-caked old lady.

Although my knee was impersonating a soccer ball, nothing seemed to be broken. My doctor recommended at least three weeks of good rest. I told him about our upcoming India trip, for which my friend Jaya had spent the last few months planning every detail. My doctor then recommended drugs, the good ones.

“No problem,” I said. “My traveling companions have spent their working careers in the pharmaceutical and medical fields, and there is nothing they enjoy more than an excuse to shovel legal drugs into me.”

I hobbled around the next day, glad at least that my India trip was several days off. That’s when I heard from the airline that my flight (which had been booked for months) was cancelled, and I would have to leave a few days early. Like, tomorrow.

When you live on an island connected only via dodgy ferry service, you learn that you can’t count on timely deliveries. So we reluctantly said goodbye to our Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) plans at the Village Hall, and headed for the last boat out.

That just left a few things for me to do.

1. Learn to walk with a cane.
2. Pack for India trip, leaving the next day.
3. Buy a complete new trip wardrobe. Buy the essentials such as new underwear that doesn’t have holes and a new coat that doesn’t lose feathers through the rip from my Christmas Eve fall and make me look like I’m molting. Duck-tape the coat rips. Ditto for the underwear.
4. Set the alarm for the middle of the night and go to bed early so I get at least a couple hours sleep despite my revolting knee-blob, which luckily had subsided to the size of a grapefruit.

So far so good. I had just fallen asleep, when the house exploded. At least, that’s what it sounded like to me. The dog was also very concerned. When the banging and cursing died down, I asked the Hub if he was okay. There was a short interval of panting, and then a reply. “No.”

As I pieced it together, he didn’t want to disturb my rest, so he was attempting to get ready for bed in the dark when the bathroom door viciously assaulted him. I got the light on, and wow. Heads really bleed a lot.

“I’m fine,” he insisted. “If you hold the edges together, I can just superglue it and drive you to the airport.”

I told him he was delirious and called the NHS. The very nice lady on the other end asked a lot of questions, and she and I agreed that he should go to the hospital and allow actual medical people to put his face back together. He should be prepared, she added, to spend the rest of the night there.

We looked at each other, and at my packed suitcase. There was no way he could go to a busy emergency room and make it back before I had to leave. And of course, there was the dog. The Hub floated the superglue idea again, which both the nurse and I vetoed, while the dog looked concerned.

So yes, fellow bloggers. This is when I earned my title of the Worst Wife On The Planet. I sent a bleeding Hub in a taxi to the hospital. Alone. Then I waited a few hours, walked the dog, locked up the house, grabbed Granddad’s walking cane, and went on an international trip.

Epilogue #1

It turned out that cane was incredibly useful.  I’ll probably never travel without it again, because every time I got in an airport line, from ticketing to security to flight boarding, a solicitous airline employee would immediately pick me out, bypass all the waiting passengers with normal-size knees, and insist I move to the front of whatever queue was going.

The Hub reported (eventually) that he had finally seen a doctor who — and I couldn’t make this up — superglued his forehead back together.

Epilogue #2

While the Hub went to bed with a three-day headache, I landed in India. For the next three weeks, the cane and I went everywhere. Jaya and Janine shopped at many, many medical shops, and many drugs were purchased. I took all of them, no questions asked. The knee shrunk to almost human size.

And I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Despite Jaya’s many suggestions in every town we stopped in that she could find an orthopedist she was in some way related to, and despite the fact that we were in the new India, crammed full of the latest medical technology, I DID NOT do any medical tourism.  Nada. Zilch.

Instead I returned to Scotland and a knee that was getting worse every day. My doctor said the most he could do was to put me in the queue for a knee clinic on the mainland which could (maybe) get me in the queue for an MRI. By now the knee pain was waking me up at night, and walking was to be avoided.

I called Jaya, and a week later I was back in India.

Jaya’s neighbor’s brother-in-law’s nephew (or something like that) was a hotshot orthopedist, and the next day we were in his hospital waiting room. He immediately sent me for an x-ray and an MRI. That afternoon, the MRI report came back full of ominous phrases like grade-III tear and Chondromalacia Patella grade IV.

If he had seen me when the injury occured, the doctor said, he would have ordered the MRI and done surgery immediately. Now, four months later, it was too late. He prescribed anti-inflammatories and referred me to a physical therapist.

And that’s how I met Dr. Shruti. She said she would see us the next morning. After pouring over the MRI and x-ray results and asking detailed medical questions, she smiled at me, a tall slender young woman with a sweet voice, radiant smile, and torture skills that would make the Spanish Inquisition jealous. Seriously, if she had asked for any information from my bank details to our country’s nuclear codes, I would have handed it over without hesitation.

After days of torture (which Jaya claimed was actually less than an hour), Dr. Shruti let me go. This went on for a week, with breaks for her homemade buttermilk and to meet her charming little boy and her husband, an eye surgeon. In between, she braced her inhumanly strong self against my various body parts, forcing my muscles to stretch while I whimpered and she chatted about various places she liked to go for holidays. Her high tech arsenal included ultrasound treatments, and laser torture muscle treatments. Then she would put one knee on my good knee and brace her body against the other leg, my stretching muscles screaming in protest.

Since returning from India, I’ve continued to do Dr. Shruti’s exercises, and my knee feels better.

I’ve also finally gone to the specialist over on the mainland. He was unimpressed by the MRI results from India, and insists I just have arthritis.

I feel another medical tourist trip coming on. Hopefully, Dr. Shruti will have more buttermilk.

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Please see this entire series for tales of how medicine and travel intersected for me. 

• Part 1: How I became a medical tourist
• Part 2: The adventures of the WMIT (World’s Most International Tooth)
• Part 3: Even further adventures of the WMIT (World’s Most International Tooth)
• Part 4: A Christmas Miracle?
• Part 5: Come for the finger surgery. Stay for the temples. And the paratas.
• Part 6: Why I’m the worst wife on the planet.
• Part 7: Delhi Belly: a level of hell that Dante missed.