Nat Locke: X-rays haven’t shown my broken bones three times before, but this time is different. Right? Wrong

According to Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished for being a bit of a tyrant and doomed to push a rock up a hill, only for it to roll back down again once he got close to the top. And he had to do that forever. We now associate his name with laborious and futile tasks. What a legacy. My question is: which character in Greek mythology was sentenced to never learning their lesson and therefore repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again for all eternity? Because that character is me. For the FOURTH time in my life, I have not learned from my mistakes. As all of you regular readers will be aware, I have a disturbing tendency to trip, fall, tumble and go splat. I find new and innovative ways to do it, but the result is often the same. As a responsible former health professional, I then go and get my injuries looked at. And on four occasions, the X-rays have not revealed any fractures. And on all four occasions, (spoiler alert) there were fractures. My issue is that when I am sitting in emergency, waiting for my X-rays to be read, nursing my latest injury, I am unable to recall this fact, so when the doctor tells me there’s nothing broken, I believe them. Every time. Then it takes a good few weeks for me to realise that the pain is not abating as it should if it’s just bruising or a sprain or some other sort of non-fracture injury. And it’s then that I request an MRI and discover that I do indeed have a broken bone. The pattern is exactly the same every time. When will I learn? WHEN WILL I LEARN? As you may recall, this latest iteration was caused by falling off my bike several weeks ago. At the time, I went to hospital and told them that my elbow felt very similar to when I fractured the radial head (a technical term for elbow) on my other arm three years ago. But I also had a very sore knee, and they asked me which hurt more: the elbow or the knee. At that point, the knee was excruciating, so they paid a lot more attention to that. The X-rays showed nothing on either, so they gave me some painkillers, a knee brace and a crutch and sent me home. The knee is now almost 100 per cent fine, and now that the painkillers are no longer in play, it has become rapidly apparent that there was something quite troubling going on with the elbow. But did I think back to the last three times the X-rays had said there was nothing wrong? No, I did not. So, I was as surprised as anyone when the MRI showed “a minimally displaced fracture of the radial head/neck, extending to the articular surface”. MRI reports are so dry, aren’t they? Just lacking a bit of emotion, if I’m honest. Spice it up a bit, could you doc? It turns out that when I said it felt exactly like the time I broke my right radial head, I was spot on. Anyway, you could have knocked me over with a feather at this news, except I probably would have broken something and it wouldn’t have shown up on X-ray and I would have wondered why it was still sore three weeks later. And so the pattern continues. The other aspect of this particular curse is that the diagnosis invariably arrives when I am within weeks of going on a travel adventure. I once received a call from my doctor to tell me that the reason my foot was so sore and swollen was because there was a bit of broken bone floating around in it. Twenty four hours later, I was on a plane to New York, a city best explored on foot. When a CT scan revealed that as well as breaking my right elbow, I had also busted two bones in my wrist, I took my newly minted splint to Broome for a holiday. It didn’t get itchy in the humidity at all. Not once. And now, I have just over a fortnight to nurse my left elbow through this fracture before I jump on a plane to Mexico. I’m hoping the high altitude of Mexico City assists with the healing process. Or is it the opposite? I really should have checked. Anyway, pray for me and my bone density. I’ll have some extra queso just to be sure.