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2026-03-19

Week 271: Dislocation

I’m exceptionally late to write this up. Even though I was assiduous about writing my notes on paper last week, I’ve had too many busy evenings to sit down and transcribe them. I’m finally doing it, more than halfway to next week.

I sorted out our remortgage so we have another five years at an amount we can afford, and it’s just everything else in the world that is unpredictable and chaotic.

My new-to-me phone arrived and I installed everything on it. It’s much less stressful having a battery that lasts a day of normal use once again.

Apart from that, the Pixel 8 seems pretty much the same as my old Pixel 6a. Maybe it’s faster, but I can’t tell. The camera seems to have an extra lens for macro shots.

At some point, once I’m confident that I’ve got everything off the old phone, I’ll reset it to stock Android and get the battery replaced.

On Wednesday morning, I was running late and decided to take my 9am call at home. At five minutes to nine, L— sent me a message to say that someone on a Lime bike had crashed into her and she was hurt. They had flown out of a side path at negligent speed and hit her front wheel, knocking her to the ground.

I cycled down with my trailer to catch her pushing her bike home with one good arm. I folded the Brompton, put it on the trailer, and we walked back. I made a cup of tea while she worked out how badly she was injured.

She couldn’t move her right arm properly and thought it was broken, so we went to the Urgent Care unit at Guys’ Hospital. They handed her the clipboard with admission form, which she couldn’t write, of course. I pointed this out, took it and played the secretarial role.

After an x-ray, the good news was that no bones were broken. It was, instead, a relatively unusual posterior dislocation of the shoulder.

The good thing about the Urgent Care unit is that it’s closer to home and much less chaotic and stressful than Accident & Emergency. The downside is that because Guys’ doesn’t have A&E, they can’t give you the really strong painkillers. Instead, they put L— on laughing gas and got me to hold her hand while they tried to relocate the shoulder.

It’s a horrible experience to be an onlooker while someone you love is screaming in pain as a team of people manhandle her arm. But then! the shoulder clunked back into place and she was suddenly much more comfortable. Her shoulder will still take time to recover properly, but it was a much better outcome than we had feared a few hours earlier.

We got home around 2pm, ate lunch, and both fell asleep for a long nap.

Checking out her bike for damage is a job for this coming weekend.

I bought myself a new pillow speaker. It’s almost exactly the same as the old one, which I was very happy with until the cable broke (which I fixed) and the switch became unreliable (which I couldn’t do much about). They’ve improved the material used for the cable; it’s still absurdly long, but much more flexible than before.

To help me sleep, I like to listen to radio plays and audiobooks, and the speaker lets me do that without either disturbing L— or having to use earphones, which become uncomfortable. I’d been missing my pillow speaker since it stopped working, but when I saw I could pick a new one up off the shelf in John Lewis for under £15, I realised that I had been suffering for no good reason.

For sleep hygiene, I don’t like to keep my phone anywhere near the bedroom, so I use the speaker with an old Sansa Clip MP3 player running RockBox. It has physical buttons that let me operate it, and even resume it at the last playback point, without looking at it, and I’ve configured it so that it turns itself off automatically after 15 minutes, which is usually enough to send me to sleep. It would be much harder to replicate that half of the setup these days.

I spent Saturday afternoon at a workshop on the Guidonian hand, learning about mediaeval hexachord music theory. The lack of a seventh scale tone makes things complicated fast once you move beyond ut re mi fa sol, and you have to treat major and minor scales quite differently.

I also discovered that I can’t easily touch the base of my middle finger with my thumb on my left hand, and that my left thumb is actually at quite a peculiar angle. My right hand is fine. I don’t know whether it’s years of playing stringed instruments, billions of presses on the space bar, or some unnoticed injury (perhaps contemporary with that time I fractured my radial head in one of my own cycling accidents), but it’s weird!