Weeknotes 210

On Friday evening I hopped up onto the bed for two seconds to reach something. As I stepped back down I landed awkwardly and felt my ankle crunch into a sickening position beneath the full weight of my body. The all-consuming, eye-watering pain subsided after a couple of minutes and I was left with a swollen foot that I couldn’t walk on.

Sandwiching my foot between a bag of ice and a bag of frozen peas got me through the night, then in the morning I had to make my way to Homerton Hospital Accident & Emergency like that bloke in Shoreditch. They took an X-ray and, sure enough, I’d broken my fifth metatarsal.

I’d never had anything worse than a hairline fracture so I didn’t know what treatment to expect. Would they put my foot in a cast? Would I need some kind of surgery to put the visibly misaligned pieces back together? No, apparently I just have to rest it and wait for it to magically heal. The hospital sent me home with painkillers, crutches and the black boot of shame.

Before going to A&E I fully charged my devices, downloaded some YouTube videos and packed snacks in anticipation of having to wait for hours to be seen. In reality they saw me immediately and I was in & out in thirty minutes which is a truly incredible level of service. (For the benefit of my American friends I’ll clarify that I paid nothing.)

There was no way for the nurse to give me an actual copy of the X-ray. I’ve made a subject access request to see if I can get the DICOM files for it, plus the ones for the MRI I had at the same radiology department last year, since on that occasion (contra weeknotes) I never actually bothered to send the form. I have no real use for these images but I’m curious to see them in high resolution and, well, I suppose they do belong to me in some abstract way.

Anyway, I’m fine. It hurts a lot to put weight on it, but when I sit with my feet up I don’t feel any pain at all, so that’s what I’m doing. It took me about ten minutes to hobble precariously up several flights of stairs to my flat so I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere for the next couple of weeks.

Tell you what, I do not have the upper body strength for walking on crutches. Wow.

The big inconvenience of being unable to walk has made all the week’s other little annoyances seem inconsequential.

For example, there was no water for two mornings in a row, which meant I had to wash my face and brush my teeth with the contents of my gym water bottle and use the single available flush wisely. There was never any explanation for this but it resolved itself within an hour both times so it must be fine.

I also thought my dishwasher was broken because the water didn’t get hot during the programme, but further investigation has made it seem very likely that I accidentally put it on a cold wash that one time. That’s a relief because I speculatively began to shop for replacement dishwashers in the January sales and it was a living hell.

The final minor annoyance was the amount of bedside table space being wasted by the USB-C cable sticking out of my wireless phone charger at the wrong angle. I decided to buy a little right-angle adapter to make it come out sideways instead of backwards.

I’d failed to consider that “right-angle USB-C adapter” is not specific enough because of the unnecessary freedoms of three-dimensional space. You also have to know:

1. is the axis of rotation of the right-angle bend within the plane of the USB-C plug itself (pitch) or perpendicular to it (yaw)?

2. after this rotation, does the plane of the receptacle retain its orientation or is it rotated again around an axis perpendicular to the bend (roll)?

The four different answers give four different shapes of adapter and that made my head hurt. The one I got was the yaw-then-roll variety so the cable could come out sideways while protruding backwards as little as possible. It works perfectly, but what a Euclidean nightmare.

I finished the first three seasons of Barry. Its overall quality is excellent and ronny/lily in particular is stupendously good.

The show has a lot of superficial similarities to Dexter and Breaking Bad but it does a good job of establishing its own weird tone. And although I’ve found Sally’s character a bit unconvincing at times — is she an insightful chronicler of the human condition? an egotistical narcissist with no emotional intelligence? both?? — she seems to have settled down by this point in the story.

I’m keen to watch the final season and I hope they can stick the landing.

I forgot to mention that Ruby 3.3 includes my fix for using -⁠-⁠backtrace-⁠limit in RUBYOPT. I recommend setting it because unlimited backtrace length is a silly default.