When my view went from concrete driveway to endless blue sky without any notice I knew two things: this wasn’t a good start to 2025 and my wrist wasn’t supposed to bend that way.
Then a third followed fast behind: vomit. Which was not good for the tourist who had plenty of kindness but unfortunately limited English when he stopped to check on the strange woman in a heap on the footpath.
“I’m okay ... I just think I’ve broken my arm ... no stand back ... I’m going to vomit,” I said as calmly as a person can who finds themselves in that situation.
Realising there was a language barrier, I tried to mime the above in the world’s least graceful interpretive dance. But I shouldn’t have worried, because once the violent puking kicked in he got the message.
It’s already embarrassing enough as a grown adult that you can’t operate the body you’ve had for 30-odd years without breaking it. But like a kid who stands at the end of your bed at 3am saying “I frew up”, I have the added humiliation of uncontrollable vomiting. It’s a familial trait. Some people inherit generational wealth but my family only inherent some sort of crossed wiring in our brains that decided immediate chundering was the best evolutionary pain response. Its only real benefit is to our mums who know by the state of their carpet which child is faking an injury to get out of school and which needs to go to the hospital.
The pebble-dashed shoes of that unfortunate tourist became the sacrificial bellwether that told me I needed to go to the emergency department.
I rang my boyfriend to come scrape me off the footpath and chuck me into an Uber. “Will we call an ambulance?” he asked. “Jesus, no,” I replied, partly because I suffer from the false belief that it would financially ruin me forever but mostly because I would have died from embarrassment if I’d arrived with sirens and lights going off only to find out it was a bad sprain.
Envisioning a long night waiting in a public hospital emergency department, I sent my friend to the house to get a comfy T-shirt and long pants. I didn’t need the added Australian horror of standing up on a muggy evening only to find you’ve left the skin off the back of your thighs behind on the sticky, vinyl chair.
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By the time the Uber came, the low blood pressure which had kicked this all off in the first place had made a return. The driver seemed very concerned at the floppy pale woman sticking her head out the window, if only for the sake of his upholstery. My boyfriend took the short trip to the hospital to spiral about how bad the wait would be. In all the paperwork and visas, I had forgotten to reapply for Australian private healthcare. We were heading for a public hospital after sundown on a Saturday night – the equivalent of a healthcare thunderdome.
“It’s going to be HOURS, nay YEARs,” he speculated with typical Irish optimism.
I decided I didn’t care how long it was, as long as they gave me pain relief or a punch to the back of the head to knock me out so I didn’t have to feel anything any more.
We were triaged in five minutes. “Ahhh nuar whaddya done t’yaself?” the friendly nurse asked before immediately asking for Penthrox. When a doctor came out carrying the green whistle, only seen after the worst of rugby tackles, I knew it was bad.
“Here, have fun with that moight, you’ll be right,” he said. My boyfriend was reassured by their warm and casual attitudes because he doesn’t understand Australians are always like this. These are people who watched their dads catch poisonous snakes armed only with a pillow case and a stick as children. They are chronically unfazed.
For someone who never quite mastered being competent at bongs, I was having a great time on the green whistle. They admitted me 15 minutes later and within 2.5 hours of breaking my wrist I was on my way home in an Uber, X-rayed, fleshly plaster casted and not a dollar out of pocket.
“That would have never happened in Ireland,” my boyfriend said, as impressed with this authentic Australian experience as if I’d just let him hold a Koala. At my follow up appointment a day later I was given the option of having surgery that week or seeing if the bone would set by itself.
“So you weren’t lying,” the boyfriend said, as if I’d made up the Australian health system in defence to jibes about our rugby team being shite. “No, but drop bears aren’t real,” I replied.