On January 26th last, we had a heavy storm. Not unusual for Cairns normally but Australia is in the grip of a nasty drought and Cairns has had no wet season for two years running. Anyway, my sewing room got flooded by a leak in the roof and my husband climbed up on to the roof to repair the leak, which he did satisfactorily. Came time to climb down and guess who didn't call me to hold the ladder, and guess what happened next.
I saw one foot appear, I got up to go outside and then the other foot appeared and then he was falling. I can't get the image out of my mind. 2 metres, straight onto a rock wall on his face. He hit his face coming down, and then he landed on his left arm and smashed the humerus and the elbow joint and somehow the ladder ended up under his hip so he has a bruise on his left hip from the hipbone almost to his knee.
It took two ambulance teams over two hours to extricate him and then he had a four hours op to repair the elbow and a week in hospital.
My artist training came in handy to observe the changed profile and diagnose a broken cheek bone and insist on xrays to confirm that injury.
On Feb 3rd, he had another op to repair the cheek bone with another overnight stay in hospital. He now looks like an extra from "One flew over the cuckoo's nest"
Now I've got him home and it looks like he will be out of action and off works for weeks. Fortunately he manages a business so he doesn't depend on the use of his arm. If he does enough physio he should get most movement back in his elbow, hopefully.
It staggers me to think how quickly your life can get turned upside down. Here we were saving madly for a holiday in March and now this accident will cost us about $8000 and him many mopnths of pain and inconvenience. A plumber would have charged us a couple of hundred dollars to do the job.
Anyway, I've managed to visit this site a few times just to distract myself but I can't concentrate on painting at the moment.
All very frustrating.
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