Carol’s Column

When life is just a bowl of kumquats

Nurse Nancy strikes again. Ja, well, no fine. It’s been one of those weeks that should have been cancelled.

The phone rang on Monday night as I was doing my kneecap shaping exercises.

“Mrs Lazar?” it said.

“Yes.”

“Your son Jamie has been knocked off his bike.”

“Is he alive?” I croaked.

“Yes, but he’s badly hurt. They’ve called an ambulance.”

Like the Concorde, I flew to Linden. To find an ambulance flashing, Jamie Lazar strapped to a board, his neck in a brace, his face, like Macbeth’s, covered in blood.

Next to him, dazed and equally bloodstained, sat his mate, Graham Hall.

They looked dreadful.

“OhmyGodcanyouwiggleyourtoes?” I gulped.

“Ma, it’s a rave,” grunted Jamie sideways through his swollen, bloody mouth.

A rave?

Well, there are raves and raves. It seemed the boys, their bikes and a motorist had made contact.

“Relax,” said the dishy-looking ambulance man with the Magnum moustache, “they’re alive.”

Shock is good for the system, they say. It peps up the adrenalin, gets your blood going and revitalises aging skin cells, causing them to become youthfully elasticated.

I don’t need elasticity.

The boys were whipped away into casualty at the J G Strijdom Hospital, and it was near midnight when they re-appeared X-ray, examined, cleaned, strapped and bandaged.

Black and blue, bruised, swollen and cut, they looked like two Frankenstein monsters.

Jamie’s collarbone was shattered. Badly.

Next day, Graham moved in, and within hours, they were surrounded by chocolate cakes and herds of admiring fans. Each with his own terrible tale of gore to tell. Jason’s smashed kneecap, Garry’s crushed fingers. The list was endless.

By Thursday we’d developed family sidelines. My husband had toothache, my daughter flu, and Motor-the-cat, asthma. “So unusual” said the vet.

Meanwhile, Jamie’s collarbone, with a mind of its own, grew at right angles to his body.

“You gotta have an op,” said the surgeon.

“Great,” I muttered on Friday, while mixing muesli in the kitchen and feeding Motor his anti asthma cough syrup.

Just then, there was a wail behind me.

“I’m having my baby,” said Esther Lekgoate, the mainstay of the Lazar household. Good heavens.

We lost Baragwanath Hospital. But miniature Freddie Lekgoate was no sloth. He was determined to arrive. It is no joke driving around in the bush with an imminent person.

“Relax,” I said to Esther as my hair fell out, “the worst that can happen is he’ll be born in a red Mazda.” Nurse Nancy strikes again.

We finally made Bara with moments to spare. They wanted to admit us both. It was tempting, but there was still snot en trane on the homefront.

Later, Jamie and his collarbone took themselves off to hospital for a re-vamp job.

He lay between a motorbike crash leg, a damaged soccer knee and a bus accident hand. The four of them waiting for their operations swapping damaged tissue tales.

While I agonised over my poor, broken son, he joked and the anaesthetist arrived.

“I’m going to put you to sleep,” he smiled at Jamie.

“Just see you wake him up again,” I muttered.

“It’s all part of the same deal,” he grinned.

Great, an Eddie Eckstein was giving Jamie an anaesthetic.

The four boys went in smiling and came out sleeping.

Later, much later, as I drove away from the hospital, my car’s stomach made peculiar noises. No, not you, too, I thought to myself as I swerved to avoid a blue-rinsed lady in a puce Merc.

As I got home, I tripped and fell upon a dog dropping, causing concussion to my coccyx.

Why is every day of my life Friday 13th?

Why not?

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