Another day at the hospital

Let’s start on a positive note. Isn't this coleus lovely? There it is, sitting on my lawn last Saturday, beautifully crimson, with one autumnally symbolic leaf fallen on the grass in front of it – not that I noticed it at the time. I just love the amazingly diverse colours and shapes of leaves.

However, my father – who got out of hospital yesterday afternoon despite his slightly cracked right hip– fell down in the bathroom at 5 this morning and broke his left hip. He really hated being in hospital last week and complained constantly, so when the combined forces of my husband, Daughter 2 and myself were unable to lift him off the bathroom floor this morning because it was too painful for him, he said that he was definitely not going to any hospital, that we couldn’t make him, that he would refuse to go in an ambulance… .

However, when the ambulance came, he fortunately co-operated, and all the time in Accident and Emergency he kept up this – for him, frankly unusual - attitude. I was so sorry for him, though. He was the dux of his school (top prizewinner); he was in Bomb Disposal during the war and won the George Medal – very prestigious; he was a top chap in industry during his working career as well as being a strong, tireless sort of man. And there he was on a trolley, a shrunken, deaf old chap in absorbent underpants. Oh dear.