It helps if the doctor actually looks at the X-ray

It’s six years since I wrote in The Spectator about my broken right ankle, humiliatingly sustained when I slipped while arguing with a swimming-pool attendant in a French ski resort. The joke among British patients in the hospital in Grenoble, all of them with much worse injuries than mine, was that it was better to stay where we were, where staff knew about broken bones and where there was a comfortable hostel for patients’ relatives, rather than return to the bosom of the NHS where we might catch MRSA.

Well, now I’ve broken my left ankle and this time I had no choice. My motor scooter skidded on slippery cobbles outside the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton and crushed my foot. No one else was involved. Indeed, passers-by were extremely helpful. One man picked me up, while another put the bike back on its stand and they each offered to call an ambulance, or to accompany me to hospital. I eventually persuaded them I was perfectly all right by hopping back on the bike, still shaking a bit, and going home, where it was my wife who said I really did need hospital treatment and took me to King’s College Hospital in Camberwell.

My foot was by now increasingly painful and swollen and, after about an hour’s wait at A&E, a doctor said it was probably sprained but I ought to have an X-ray. The X-ray operative told me she was not allowed to disclose what she could see on her machine but that I’d have to wait for a doctor’s analysis. Then there was another hour’s wait before a doctor appeared. He asked about other problems I had had, medication for asthma, operations for cancer, that sort of thing, before telling me I had sprained my ankle.