A Stitch in Time

Joy of joys, it’s time for my stitches to be taken out. Yasmin has arranged for the hotel doctor to come to my room and do the deed. After this, I’ll be free to immerse myself in the body of water of my choosing. I’ve been eyeing the pool and longing for a cool dip, in spite of the fact that I’d have to wear the bathing suit in public. 

I haven’t seen the sordid ankle since it got a check-up in the hotel back in Alexandria. At that time, the physician had removed the bandages, looked at the miserable thing, jabbed it a few times, nodded appreciatively, said it was pretty, and rewrapped it tighter than salami. What I saw, in that brief moment, was an ugly swollen lump with scars on both sides. The only thing the Frankenstein ankle was missing was a pair of bolts on its “neck”. Pretty is not what I would have called it. Pretty awful would be more accurate. Since then, it has been cowering under the bandages. I’m hoping it has healed, but with my luck, it has more likely mutated or sprouted acorns.

At the appointed time, there’s a knock at the door. The doctor is here (another nice-looking gentleman) and I let him into the room. At his urging, I sit on the bed with my leg propped up on a pillow, and he begins to free the unholy foot from its wrappings, an activity not dissimilar to the unveiling of a mummy. I almost expect to hear thunder claps and creepy music radiating from under the bed, or wherever sinister sound effects lurk. Instead, I hear the pebbly sound of sand, falling out of the wrappings onto the pillow underneath my foot, the excess spilling out onto the bedspread. The doctor looks up at me with eyebrows shoved up into his hairline. 

“The beach attacked me,” I say as a meagre explanation for the presence of the foul substance.

“Attacked you?” he asks, his eyebrows now floating above his head.

“Yes, it did,” I reply, and go on to relate yesterday’s excursion without omitting any of the gruesome details.

While listening to my story, he dusts the sand off the bedspread and pillow, and resumes the unwrapping. He shakes his head at my account of the beach and dock ordeal and interjects a few well-placed tsk tsk sounds and a soft-spoken “That’s terrible” at the appropriate time. Still, I can’t help but notice that, though sympathetic and considerate, he can’t quite conceal a bemused smile on his handsome face.

Following the unwinding of what seems like twelve hundred feet of gauze, the ankle is revealed in all its ugly glory. Unsightly as it is, I thank my stars there are no acorns or other alien growths present. Smiley Doctor is relieved—as am I—that the sand has not made its way into the inner bandages where it could have caused major trouble. 

After inundating the ankle with a few gallons of iodine and swabbing it like the deck of the Mary Celeste, Smiley Doctor pokes around looking for the stitches. Finding something, he tugs on it hoping that it will obediently come out. Nope. Heavy resistance is encountered. The stitches have stubbornly gone into hibernation under the skin and won’t be making an appearance today. 

The salami, still looking ghastly, is rewrapped and I’m informed that since the stitches need to be forcibly evicted, a clinic visit is required. Since we’ll be returning to Canada in a couple of days, the lucky stitches get a reprieve until after I get home. 

Thoughts of a luxury bath evaporate. Thoughts of a dip in the pool follow suit. Tomorrow morning, it’ll be back to snorkelling in the bathroom sink.