Limping Towards The Finish...Roger Eli (Part 12)

Limping towards the Finish

    I’d had a week in Kalkan and so that was another meeting missed. And the meeting before that I’d had to scoot off early when Mrs T rang to say she had a broken finger and could I take her to casualty.
 
    So that still left chapters 9 to 14 to go through. In fact chapter 9, because it had become so long, had been split in two ro make a new 9 and a new number 10. The new number 10 dealt with the 4 months that Roger spent going between surgeons to get his knee sorted and made use of the 9 pages of notes that he wrote not long afterwards.
 
     Chance and the decisions of others, and the way these things affect our lives is certainly a theme of the book and this cropped up again when it became clear that it was only because physio Jimmy Holland retired and new man Mark Leather came in, that a new surgeon was found who finally sorted Roger’s knee after the mess made by the Manchester guy. Mark Leather had worked previously with Steve McLaughlin at Blackpool and so had no hesitation in sending him there. Roger assumes that had Jimmy Holland not retired all that would have happened would have been that he would have returned to Manchester yet again so the Manchester surgeon could have yet another look, and continue to make a mess of things.
 
     It seems astonishing that McLaughlin found the pieces of cartilage that had been described as “dissolved” in Manchester. It was astonishing that McLaughlin found no evidence at all, of the cruciate ligament tear that had been diagnosed in Manchester. For legal reasons the Manchester guy will not be named.  Roger remains angry now 20 years later. He was advised that taking legal action would have been fruitless. Roger watched the whole procedure on camera having had just a local anaesthetic. It reminded me of a time when I had a local anaesthetic for something I needed doing. I watched the whole thing on screen; taped music, Sting if I remember right, played in the background. And one of the nurses, when she asked what I did and I said I was a headteacher, spent most of the time talking about her son’s reading problems.
 
     The support he received from Jimmy Mullen and Harry Wilson was nil, ...........

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A book Of Eli