So what happened next? Monday finally arrived as the nights and days melted into one long day. The drugs kept coming too. They had to for the pain of my broken shoulder continued. It would ease but only for short periods. The nurse arrived to my bedside with a wheelchair. I’m lucky. I’ve health insurance. This is what all that money is for, occasions like this. As I gingerly plonked into the seat of a wheelchair for the first time in my life, the realisation, the enormity of what had happened smothered me for the first time. Here I was totally helpless, maybe for the first time since I was a baby, totally reliant on others for support.

Everything is relative, there are people worse off than me, far worse off, but its little consolation as you sit into a wheelchair for a flight home for a tough surgery. My eyes welled up as I was pushed down the corridor. It was a combination of leaving these people who had helped the mangled body of a foreigner in such a caring way over the weekend and the regret of what had happened. How could I have been so careless to trip on a busy street?

I was whisked through the airport which was about the only exciting part of this whole journey. I made it home battered and bruised but at least I was home. Similar to the gasps of the doctors in Holland, my surgeon in Dublin had the expression on his face of a man who had a big job on his hands as he surveyed my X-ray results. They have to paint the doomsday scenario, all the things that could go wrong.

Never before in my life did I feel physically sick as something grim was being explained to me. By the middle of last week, the surgery of piecing my shoulder back together like a jigsaw had taken place almost six days after that initial split second smash. When I remember the incident now, it frightens me more and more in a post-traumatic sort of way with lots of “what if” questions.

Yet had it been my head rather than my shoulder that took my full body weight, well there is little point imagining the outcome there.

The night following the surgery was the toughest few hours in my life ever. The pain was extraordinary and the nurses could not get enough emergency painkillers into me. I speak as if I am the only person ever to suffer a traumatic injury. Of course I’m not. Over the past week or so, I’ve come into contact with people far sicker than me, many of them much older.

If there is a God, I am being punished for something I did wrong. Others would call it karma. But why do the older more vulnerable in society need to suffer? Hospitals and the health system and how it works is incredible to witness first-hand. Those on the frontline are quite extraordinary people. There is so much going on even dealing with one patient that it is hard to comprehend how it works at all, let alone operate as perfect.

Be thankful for your health. Life is precious. Now I appreciate that more than ever.

It doesn’t make sense

How do you explain to an outsider our democratic presidential election system? We are going to have an election for the position of first citizen, albeit not a hugely powerful role, yet neither of the country’s two biggest political parties with the support of almost two thirds of the population will have a runner. Yes it’s definitely time for a rethink of the embarrassing situation we now find ourselves in.