Free You Have Not a Leg to Stand On by D.D. Mayers Page A

lying on your stomach for it to heal.
    By the end of the first day, even though we’d frequently stopped for a ten-second lift, I had a dangerous red patch at the end of the sacral bone on my right bum cheek. If it didn’t soften from angry red to a pale pink, within an hour, you have a problem. ‘Ground control, we have a problem.’ It still hadn’t gone by the morning. Fortunately, my little wife had her driving licence with her, foreseeing such a problem. She took over the driving for the second day while I lay flat, with the back of the passenger seat down, my body rolled to the left to take all pressure off that dangerous red patch. She wasn’t used to driving on the wrong side of the road in the right side of the car! So we made slow progress. She did however, enjoy the power and lightness of this beautifully designed machine as much as I did. She drove it frequently when we lived in the East End of London in our extraordinary Warehouse on the River, and there after.
    It didn’t matter in the slightest making such slow progress, we might as well have taken forever. Our second night stop was memorable for all the wrong reasons. The little hotel had a ground floor room in a very pretty little village, I don’t remember where, on the edge of a wandering stream. The menu sounded delicious and a carafe of red wine would go down a treat. The red patch had thankfully started to fade so I’d probably be free to drive the following morning.
    Before supper we both thought it would be very luxurious to have a lovely hot bath in the deep, roll topped bath invitingly awaiting. Generally, we shared the same water, my wife would get in first because she liked it very hot, then I’d get in after her when the water had cooled sufficiently for me. A habit left over from my childhood in the Kedong Valley, due to the scarcity of hot water. Tonight though, I said, ‘I’ll get in first, you can top it up with hot water if you need to.’ One of the many things I was taught by my pretty blonde physiotherapist Sally, at Stoke Mandeville hospital, was to be able to get in and out of almost any bath. The most difficult is a sunken bath. How on earth do you get, from the bottom of a sunken bath, a foot below ground level, back into your chair? I can’t tell you but I still, after forty years in a wheelchair, manage, if necessary, due entirely to Sally’s teaching.
    I ran the hot water and took off my clothes. That’s not as easy as it sounds. To take off your clothes while sitting in them, and only moving your legs by picking them up, was again, taught to me by Sally. But it does take longer than just, ‘taking off your clothes’. I returned to the bath naked. It was more than half full. I cannot think why, but I didn’t test the water before starting to get in. I faced the bath, on the side, about halfway down, with the taps on the right. I picked up my left leg and placed the foot into the water. I couldn’t feel anything, but I noticed it suddenly turned a peculiar colour and the skin was bubbling. I put my hand in the water. Oh God, it was scalding, it might as well have been boiling. Even my fingers, in that mini second, were burnt. I hauled my foot out, but it was too late. The whole foot was a bubbling, sulphurous mass of half cooked meat. I almost fainted at the sight if it. I nearly fell out of the chair, saving myself in the nick of time. My wife immediately knew something was wrong. She came running naked into the bathroom. She took one look at my foot, and sank to her knees with a gasp of horror, holding her face in her hands, ‘Oh no, Oh no, we must put it under the cold tap.’ That was easier said than done. I had to manoeuvre the chair to be nearer the taps. I had put my legs down on to the footplates before I could move the chair. It was impossible to lower the level of the water, the plug didn’t have a chain. I finally reached the cold