Detour to... Taupo Hospital

Just before we finished the Alpine Crossing, on one of the steps down, Jess went over on her ankle.

She managed to hobble back over the last kilometre or so, and then waited at the main car park while I went to the shuttle car park to fetch the van and pick her up.

Having got back to the campsite, Jess took off her boots and described what she felt like this:

It was painy!  It made me feel sick and faint when I stood up.  The ankle crunched whenever I moved it, and there was a shot of pain up the outside of my leg from the ankle to the knee.  The ankle was flat and had lost its point, with a groove running through the middle, and what felt like a bit of bone pointing backwards, pushing the skin out.  It felt nothing like the ankle on my other foot!  I had tightened the boot so I could walk, which meant there wasn’t much swelling, but I was pretty sure I had broken it.

I spoke to the campsite owner, who popped over the road to the ambulance station – but there was no-one there, so he called the emergency services instead.  Jess spoke to a paramedic nurse over the phone, who told us to go to the nearest A&E at Taupo Hospital, which was about 45 minutes’ drive away.

Our drive to the hospital was fairly quiet... obviously the outcome could be pretty catastrophic for the holiday, if she ended up needing a cast.  I was praying hard that by the time we got to the hospital, the break would be healed and it would end up simply being a sprain – over the next few days there isn’t a huge amount of walking to do, which would give time for the swelling to go down.

Taupo hospital is amusingly tiny, given the huge area it covers.  It was a single-storey building – but with free parking (England take note!).  Also, we arrived at 4.20pm, and had left by 6pm, with Jess having been triaged, x-rayed, seen by the consultant, and strapped up.

The triage nurse agreed that Jess had probably broken it – the shooting pain up the leg is a classic sign – though she didn’t feel around the ankle at all, before booking the x-ray – apparently that’s a big no-no in England... anyway, they put her in a wheelchair, so there was an obligatory photo of shame...

We looked through the day’s photos while we waited, and the upshot was, the ankle wasn’t broken – the sharp bit of bone was gone, the shooting pain up her leg was gone, and the ankle bone felt exactly like the other one again!  I don’t see any explanation other than a miracle – Jess was on the phone to the paramedic not two hours before, describing the pointy bit of bone, the shooting pain, feeling it with her own fingers – and all that was simply gone, leaving only a sprain, which can be treated with a compression sock (i.e. not a cast).

Thank you Jesus!