No Stress

Zac emerges from his anaesthetic quite comically belligerent, a state that isn’t helped by Helen, the anaesthetist, and Doctor Wong, who are standing beside him giggling.

“GET THE BLOODY NURSES TO TAKE ME UP ALREADY!” he bellows. “No! I want to go up! And there’s no space for my arm on this thing!”

“He won’t remember any of this,” says Doctor Wong, sniggering.

I inspect the arm. It looks gigantic, swathed in fresh bandages, without so much as a drain.

“GET ME OUT OF HERE!” Zac says.

“Alright, honey,” I say. “The nurses are coming to take you up to the room in just a second.”

“WHERE ARE THE BLOODY NURSES?” he yells.

“We’ve asked the nurses to take you up,” says Doctor Wong, with a commendably straight face.

The X-ray looks, well, neat. A small steel plate, secured with screws, to hold the bone together. He’ll need to travel with a card, Doctor Wong says, in case he sets off metal detectors at the airport.

Zac’s in some pain for the first few hours. There’s a little bit of a fever, the aftermath of the general anaesthetic, but that breaks. That night, in fact, I sleep so well I fail to wake when Zac summons me.

Doctor Wong swings by in the morning, with a physio. The bandages are removed, replaced with a tiny strip of plaster to cover the neat incision that’s all that remains of a week of drama and over $150,000 of our insurers’ money. The physio fits Zac with a sling and disappears.

Zac gets up, with difficulty, to go to the bathroom, his bad arm defensively lower than the other.

“What’s your problem?!” asks Doctor Wong, uncharitably. “You’re walking like a zombie. Why?”

“Because it hurts when I move it,” says Zac, irritatingly, since he’s now refusing pain relief.

“You need to use the arm,” says Doctor Wong.

Zac’s had his arm out of action for a week now, and all sorts of bad habits are coming into play. It doesn’t help that he’s left-handed, so the right arm isn’t his gaming arm.

“Will he need physio?” I ask.

“Possibly,” says Doctor Wong. “Adults always do. Kids generally don’t. He’s on the cusp between the two.”

Hmmm…. I think. That could play havoc with our travel plans.

Doctor Wong gets Zac rotating his arm. “What about gaming?” I say. “Would a trip to the arcade be any good?”

“Driving games will be OK,” says Doctor Wong. “He should be fine to fly home in a couple of days.”

“I would rather,” I say, thinking rapidly on my feet. “That he had the follow-up here, with you, who did the surgery, than in the UK. Particularly since his father’s flown out here to meet him.”

And so, it’s agreed. Zac, his father and I have a buckshee week in Hong Kong, him on a friend’s sofa, Zac and I on our travel insurance, who are putting us up in a much better class of hotel than my usual pikey, windowless Hong Kong haunts.

For, as Purple Tse, the insurance fixer, so politely puts it, “Money is no longer really an issue in this case.”

It will, I figure, be rather fun. Even if Hong Kong does have a similar effect on my waistline to Singapore and Malaysia…

Zac’s main plan for the week is Cartoon Network, gaming and summer blockbusters, all of them with Dad, plus the odd trip to our hotel buffet, which boasts not only freeflow seafood and sashimi but a chocolate fountain; mine involves a lot of eating, some grooming, and perhaps some shopping if I can find anything that will fit my giant Western shoulders.

All in all, I figure, our summer should proceed as planned, with perhaps some adjustments for the broken arm, and physio, if required. We’ll be back “home” to the UK for my second visit and Zac’s third since we left over three years ago, off to Italy to fulfil Zac’s current number one travel dream “Eat Italian Food in Italy”, have a general poke around Europe, and then… well, Egypt, if the country hasn’t blown itself apart by then.

It is, as I first thought when I came running to him from my horse in the Mongolian wilderness, just a broken arm, after all. No stress. Honestly, no stress.