Silks by Dick Francis

Author:Dick Francis [Francis, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction:Thriller
ISBN: 9780399155338
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2008-09-15T07:00:00+00:00

After a sandwich lunch at my desk, I took a taxi to University College Hospital to see an orthopaedic surgeon, with my left leg resting straight across the back seat. Seven whole weeks had now passed since I had woken up in Cheltenham General Hospital with a pile-driver of a headache that had made my skull feel as if it were bursting. With a return to consciousness had also come the discovery that I had to remain flat on my back, my left leg in traction, with a myriad of tubes running from an impressive collection of clear plastic bags above my left shoulder to an intravenous needle contraption in my forearm.

‘You are lucky to be alive,’ a smiling nurse had cheerfully informed me. ‘You’ve been in a coma for three days.’

My head had hurt so much that I had rather wished that I had remained so for another three.

‘What happened?’ I had croaked at her from inside a clear plastic mask that had sat over my nose and mouth and which, I’d assumed, was to deliver oxygen to the patient.

‘You fell off your horse.’

I had suddenly remembered everything – everything, that is, up to the point of the fall.

‘I didn’t fall off,’ I had croaked back at her. ‘The horse fell.’ An important distinction for every jockey, although the nurse hadn’t seemed to appreciate the difference.

‘How is my horse?’ I had asked her.

She had looked at me in amazement. ‘I have no idea,’ she had said. ‘I’m only concerned with you.’

Over the next few hours my headache had finally succumbed to increasing doses of intravenous morphine and the roaring fire in my throat had been extinguished by countless sips of iced water via a green sponge on a stick.

Sometime after it was dark, a doctor had arrived to check on my now-conscious form and he had informed me of the full catalogue of injuries that I had sustained, first by hitting the ground at thirty miles and hour and then having more than half a ton of horse land on top of me.

My back was broken, he had said, with three vertebrae cracked right through but, fortunately for me, my spinal cord was intact, thanks probably to the back protector that I had been wearing under my silks. Four of my ribs had been cracked and one of those had punctured a lung that had subsequently partially collapsed. My head had made hard contact with something or other and my brain had been badly bruised, so much so that a neurosurgeon had been called to operate to reduce the pressure inside my skull by fitting a valve above my right ear that would drain away the excess fluid. My left knee had been broken, the doctor had explained, and he himself had operated to fix it as best he could, but only time would tell how successful he had been.

‘So will I live?’ I had asked him flippantly.

‘It was a bit touch and go for a while,’ he had replied seriously.

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