Round Robin 2012

I’ve never tried a Round Robin and, to be honest, there are many things higher-up on my Bucket-List.  Unless I’ve misunderstood what a Round Robin is.  In which case it might be high on my Bucket-List.  Or low.  

So instead of banging on about the great things we’ve not really done this year, here’s what I wrote to my dental insurance company to explain a rather large claim I had to make this year. They paid out. 

__________

Dear Denplan,

There wasn’t enough room on the form for me to properly explain the injury I am claiming for and so I am enclosing this covering letter that I hope will explain the injury and the repair work that needed to be done.

I was on holiday in Brittany with my family.  We decided to go to a local theme park.  It was a nice little place, with trampolines, pedalos, goats and that sort of thing.  It also had a swimming pool.  It was a hot day and so we decided to go swimming. 

In France they have some sort of anti-shorts law that forbids tourists from wearing baggy swimming shorts.  Apparently, it's for reasons of hygiene.  The irony....  

My generous English shorts were forbidden and so instead I had to purchase and wear some sort of spandex disco-pant / budgie-smuggler  (traficant oiseaux?) devices that raised my voice by an octave. No matter – once I had prised myself into the things, we entered the pool area.

 

The slide was a twisty waterslide – similar to the ones found in ‘fun’ pools all over the place.  My son had a go on the slide but went really, really slowly.  As a father, it was my duty to show him how to go down fast and so I set off at speed – by way of demonstration.

The secret of speed on a waterslide is to make minimal contact with the surface.  The perfect technique is to slide down with only shoulder blades and one heel making contact.  I did this and found myself to be picking up speed very quickly.  I soon realised that I was going too fast and applied the brakes.  Not to put too fine a point on it, one’s backside should be deployed to act as brakes.  Nothing too revolting like some sort of flaring buttock / air-brake thing – just simple application of arse to slide so that the friction slows the slider down.  Works a treat with normal shorts.  Not so with the spray-on hot-pants.  I threw out the anchor, as it were.  Nothing – just a whooshing sound.  If anything, I went faster. On the final bend, I was thrown over and smashed my face into the slide.

I came to my senses in the water and covered my mouth up as I guessed that it wasn’t looking too pretty.  I could feel a missing upper incisor and a mess where my lower lip used to be.  I went straight to the lifeguard and mumbled a bloody “Au secours” to him.  He immediately put me under the shower to clean me up and then sat me down to examine the wound.  My lower lip was smashed up and the wound was full of shards of orange ‘stuff’ that I assumed to be tooth innards.  The lifeguard offered to pick out the shards using a dirty- looking pair of tweezers.  I politely declined and instead got my wife to drive me to the local hospital.  The kids were very upset but only because we had to leave the pool so soon after going in.

The local hospital was small but very helpful. After a short wait, they took me in and gave me a wholly inadequate anaesthetic while the doctor scrubbed the orange shards out of my lip.  With a wire brush.  That was fun.  She then stitched up my lip, gave me a prescription for antibiotics and pain-killers and sent me on my way. 

After returning home, I went to my dentist to get an assessment of the damage and the repairs.  He said that the orange stuff that had been embedded in my lip was not tooth innards but was most likely fibreglass from the slide.  It appears that my tooth gouged out a hole in the slide and then snapped off.  It is possibly still there or it has been found and is now being worn around a French teenager’s neck as a trophy.

I was not looking like a trophy.  My lip looked like a Bran Flake had been glued to it. I was unable to drink or eat on the right side of my mouth and anything cold or hot that hit the broken tooth hurt like hell.  Drinking beer from a bottle from one side of my mouth, while dribbling got me some odd looks.  Putting a drinking straw in my pint got me a load more.

Underneath the Bran-Flake, the stitches did their magic.  I learned that the French for “those stitches will decompose” is (roughly) “les sutures decompose”.  I did not learn that the French for “those stitches will stay there for ever and your lip will grow round them” is also “les sutures decompose”.  It was several weeks later that a medical friend pointed this out and offered to whip the stitches out there and then, in my front garden (I was out there getting busy with a dirty ho*).    I politely declined and went to my Doctor’s surgery, where it was clear that my lip had grown around my stitches.  Nothing a good, sharp pull wouldn’t fix but I will probably never enjoy fishing again.

The tooth was replaced with a crown and this morning, I was finally able to close this chapter.  I had a bill for the hospital treatment that was all in French.  I was able to phone up and in schoolboy French, give my credit card details and pay the bill.  I had no idea what the chap was saying but he seemed happy.  Out of curiosity, how do I stand insurance-wise if I have accidentally bought a hospital?


*Weeding.  But it makes gardening sound a bit more exciting.