I’m fine!

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Yesterday I caught up with our neighbour across the way. In fact our ‘actual’ neighbour is a lady in her late 80s, but since her husband died almost two years ago, two of her daughters have been spending a lot of time with her, and we have chatted a few times when we’ve seen them out and about. The older of the two daughters I hadn’t spoken to for a few weeks. I had seen her walking up and down the road once or twice; I thought she was just going out for a walk as she had done during the Covid lockdown. Then yesterday I saw her ahead of me when I took some rubbish out, so I called out ‘Hello’ (didn’t want her to think I was sneaking up behind her!) and she stopped to talk. Of course I asked the usual ‘How are you?’ and she replied ‘Oh fine, apart from a broken neck!’ and proceeded to tell me she had had a very narrow escape a few weeks ago when another driver lost control on a country road and failed to make it around a bend, crashing into her head-on. She had managed to get out of the car and walked away, apparently with just some bruising and a stiff neck, but luckily the medics took her for a CT scan and discovered a fracture to the second cervical vertabra (C2) so now she’s wearing a neck brace and being watched very carefully. She isn’t supposed to go in any vehicles as the movement replicates the cause of the injury and can shake things out of position, so she’s limited to walking - and her family don’t want her to go out of sight in case something happens, hence the short walks up and down the road! I don’t know whether to consider her lucky (to be alive) or unlucky (to have been hit in the first place). How quickly things can change! Certainly it was a good thing she was given a CT scan or she could have gone home thinking she had a whiplash injury and woken up paralysed! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2021.