Life and limb

Responding to a plaintive call, I found Janine seated on the floor with legs curled daintily under her like a ballet dancer in repose.

'You fell.'

She nodded. With her damaged sense of balance it needs only a small error for gravity to take over.

'I'm alright,' she assured me.

'Okay, well let's…'

'But I can't get up because my arm hurts when I move it.'

Ah.

With resourceful use of a footstool as a first stage we managed to get her upright and sitting in a chair. I found in the first aid box a triangular cotton sling (no idea where it came from) printed with diagrams of support for a wide choice of injured limbs, but none of them explained what to do if the corners of the triangle wouldn't reach the patient's chin. Try before you buy.

A rapid search through the rag bag yielded an old cotton shirt kept for oiling the bike chain but not yet torn into pieces. I wrapped it around her elbow and tied the shirt's arms behind her neck. Then with the help of a solicitous taxi driver we made our way to the hospital Urgencias unit, a commendably succinct name for the English Accident and Emergency. The taxi driver summoned a wheelchair.

The only problem I've got with these wonderful places is that you have to watch someone you love being wheeled away through a doorway that swings shut behind them, leaving you with nothing to do and nowhere to go except into the waiting room, where other disconsolate souls wait in silent anxiety for good news or bad. I briefly exchanged disaster reports with a couple of them.

After an hour, the kindly receptionist told me my wife was fine but still needed to be examined by the specialist in heavy falls, the traumatólogo - another splendidly evocative Spanish term.

Finally Janine was wheeled back to me again with her arm strapped into a complex sling of stout padded ribbons like a harness for restraining dangerous prisoners: there, just try and get out of that! She was clutching my old shirt which she'd saved from being chucked into a bin.

Radiography had confirmed a fracture of the upper arm, but not a catastrophic one, and the specialist considered it might repair itself without an operation. Worth a try.

Across a huge area of her upper body had crept a stain the colour of a ripe aubergine, but nobody seemed too bothered about that. Contusion caused by the physical shock. Right.

During the next few days we learned to live with three arms instead of four. The first and worst challenge was working out how to change her shirt.

'I don't think we can do it without taking off the sling,' I said. Topology, the science of loops and knots. However, I've watched in admiration on the beach as one of the regular swimmers pulls on his swimming trunks then magically removes his underpants from underneath, so…

No. A five-minute tangle of shirt and sling was enough to convince. I photographed the device from every angle then unlaced it. We got it back on again afterwards, a heartening triumph.

A few days later a repeat visit to the hospital - not to Urgencias this time but a pre-arranged consultation with the traumatólogo - brought bad news. There was now a small desplazamiento of the fracture, a misalignment. It's amazing how a friendly chap in a white coat can inform you that your upper arm is in two pieces yet sound so unperturbed.

'We can operate,' he offered, 'or if you don't want that, we can try a plaster.'

We opted for the plaster. Gathering a small team of helpers he had Janine wheeled into an operating room where they arranged her comfortably in a chair then unlaced the hi-tech sling and chucked it in a heap on the table, from which I removed it, folded it neatly and stashed it away in my pocket. You never know.

One of the helper nurses, a young man in pale blue overalls and latex gloves, was mixing water and white powder in a large plastic bowl.

'More,' specified the doctor. The nurse poured in more powder.

'More.'

His assistant hesitated. 'This will be a big plaster,' said the specialist.

Arranging Janine's forearm in front of her chest, he wrapped the entire limb in a layer of soft padding then began binding it with lengths of bandage dripping with white paste. What had started as a slim, frail limb grew beefier. Around the elbow it was soon the size of a prize-winning marrow and the assistant charged with holding it in place was turning pink. 'The weight,' explained the doctor, 'is important. It needs to pull on the fracture.'

The final touch was a loop like a long soft sausage around her neck to support the forearm, then it was back home to see what nature could achieve.

Our appointment at the hospital a few days later brought, this time, good news. The X-ray plate showed an upper arm now in a single straight line. 'La plaquita, perfecta!' enthused one of the nurses, plaquita being a little placa, the X-ray plate. It's actually a very big X-ray plate but the -ita clarifies that it's being friendly and helpful.

For a day or two the patient with her now marrow-sized arm nursed it quietly at home but when eventually we took a taxi into town, the strangest discovery was that people don't take broken arms seriously.

Sympathy you get, yes: 'It's broken? Oohh…' but then a joke, usually about me beating her up. Friend Miguel, a habitual joker, tried to rub it better over the plaster. Patience is advised: 'Poco a poco,' little by little, a handy phrase you can apply to almost anything. And another of those: 'La vida!' Life.

Yes, life. It seems to break almost everyone's arm sooner or later. I'm not sure whether that's comforting or alarming because I've never broken one of mine yet, although I did break a leg at the age of six so perhaps that lets me off the hook.

-------------- NOTES --------------

First, the triangular cotton sling I tried and failed to employ. It's based on a specification by Friedrich von Esmarch, a nineteenth century expert in battlefield first aid. Perhaps people were smaller in those days.

The English equivalent of our traumatólogo is an orthopaedist, a term which derives through French from the Greek orthos meaning straight or correct and paed- which relates to children. That seems a bit tenuous to me, although children do tend to break things I suppose, including themselves.

When as a six-year-old my leg encountered the front bumper of a Post Office van - entirely my fault - I spent the next 11 weeks and two days in hospital, mostly horizontal with one leg stretched by a cord and pulley system. It's technically known as traction. I can't remember how they prevented me from being dragged bodily to the foot of the bed, perhaps there was a retaining rope somewhere. I do remember very clearly that an older boy in the adjacent bed had a walking stick with which he kept hooking away my teddy bear, which was called Wumpy.

The reason I'm recounting this moving story is that currently my wife is getting all the sympathy and I'd like some too.