All it took was a bit of torrential rain and a quick slip on a wet metal step and now here I am with one foot up in plaster and six weeks on crutches ahead.
It happened at 3.30pm on Monday at Berlin Schönefeld airport. The transfer bus stops outside the plane. The door concertinas open and out I fall, cartoon-style, landing in a tangled heap in a puddle. The moment keeps running through my head in slow motion. Wet metal, panic to save two-year-old Hanna perched on my hip from death, bad landing. Ow!
'You want an Arzt [doctor]?' cried a voice.
No, I want to catch my plane! Nightmare visions of not getting back to work the next day loomed large. I was carried on board by men in plastic ponchos and plonked on a row of seats, my foot now bulging to balloon proportions. I wasn't sure if I was going to pass out or just be sick. The plane took off.
The Buzz attendants rallied around with paracetamol and improvised ice packs (surgical gloves filled with cocktail ice and covered with a purple headrest cloth). The captain radioed ahead for wheelchair assistance at Stansted. Wheeling me to arrivals, the assistant's walkie talkie kept ringing. 'That's the third plane in half-an-hour that's called to be met by a wheelchair,' she said. 'Most are people who've had an accident because they've drunk too much.' Lucky them, I thought feeling miserably sober and sorry for myself. The casualty waiting-room of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, London, looks like a refugee camp. Packed to capacity, the receptionist quotes a seven-hour wait. In too much pain to survive till 3am balancing on one foot I opt for home with painkillers till the next day when my right foot can be seen elsewhere and diagnosed with a torn ligament and suspected fracture.
Now everyone I meet seems to have a holiday-slipping-on-floor horror story. The time their toddler skidded on one of those beautiful rugs that Portuguese villas are so fond of on polished wooden floors; a broken elbow after slipping on a hotel marble floor and so on. My daughter now calls me Mummy Ow (could she be suffering from trauma?). My knees look as if they have been sandpapered after repeated crawling up the stairs and I can't even make a cuppa). Half my body feels as if it's been in a marathon. Well it has really, it's doing the work of two sides.
Interestingly, my travel insurance won't compensate this 'personal accident'. 'You'd have to have had the whole leg removed to be eligible,' the call centre tells me. Thankfully, it's still attached. Just about.
