I have damaged my coccyx.
We visited Céret on market day, of course, during the recent France visit. Céret is a mountain town (well - foothills), with charming open gullies running through the town taking mountain water safely through. Sometimes they are full, and sometimes empty. I say gullies - more like open drains by the sides of the road. Made of polished granite, and full of lovely, fresh. clear, cold, oxygenated water. Obviously very good for the myriad of dogs that live in the neighbourhood. Also very good for the algae that grows unencumbered on the bottom of the drain-gully things.
A car was mooching slowly down a road and in mine and Nora's direction (she wanted to go to the art museum - Picasso once lived in Céret see) and I was holding her hand given that Céret on market day is somewhat akin to Oxford Circus tube station in rush hour). Let's get out of the way, I say, and begin moving off to the left, only for my already twisted ankle (another story) to buckle on the edge of a wet, polished granite surface, slip down to the admittedly not very deep bottom, come in to contact with a mat of algae and subject me to an arse-over-tit comedy fall of epic proportions, only to fall BANG directly on to my coccyx. This is not advisable, even if approximately half my size.
When the hell was this... a month ago, at a guess. At the time, I'm surprised ... well. not surprised that the eternal "parent" action kicked in, and since Nora was frightened and crying, I was able to pick her up, hug her, and carry her over to the side of the road; calmly talk about getting a bottle of water, and then go and walk around the art museum with her, all the time, water dripping off my completely sodden trousers. What I think my body would have preferred to do was to pass out, or throw up. The pain was so extreme, I could feel how white my face was (before it went green and I started shaking).
A month later, I am having trouble sitting down. It got worse for a while, and now it appears to be getting better, slowly but, jaysus. It's not going away any time soon; the doc reckons it's pointless trying to get an x-ray and the most that we could do would be a steroid injection in to the base of my spine (nice!). Meanwhile the idea of getting on my bike and cycling to work sounds so bloody daunting I am avoiding it like the plague. Bumps in the road? What does one hit when there's no ceiling?
Anyway. "Ow", is the long and the short of it.
