The Potato Incident: A Hospital Comedy of Errors
When an English teacher sprains her ankle and tries to describe the pain using literary devices, A&E becomes less ER and more *Er—what did she just say?*
People say hospitals are scary. I say they’re just awkward — especially when you’re the patient who shows up with a literal dictionary injury.
Last year, I managed to sprain my ankle during a staff “trust-building” exercise. (Translation: I tripped over a log while trying to prove I could balance better than a Year 9 boy named Tyler.) Off to A&E I went, limping and clutching a bag of frozen peas like it was a sacred relic.
At the triage desk, the nurse asked, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain?”
Now, as an English teacher, my brain immediately rejected “5” or “6” as insufficiently descriptive. So I said, “It’s a dull, throbbing ache with intermittent spikes of sharpness, somewhat reminiscent of a woodpecker attempting to excavate my ankle joint.”
She blinked. Slowly. Then picked up her pen and wrote: “Patient says: 7. Also, extra.”
Later, they wheeled me in for an X-ray. The radiographer was lovely but clearly having a long day. He asked me to remove my shoe. I apologised profusely and warned him that my sock might be… tenacious.
He pulled it off. There was a sound like Velcro surrendering to its fate. He looked at my ankle, then at me, and said, “Blimey. That’s not a sprain — that’s a swollen potato with a bone inside.”
I laughed so hard I cried. Which, of course, made the ankle hurt more.
My husband arrived just in time to hear the doctor say, “Mrs. Lee, you’ll live. But maybe avoid logs and complex adjectives in the future.”
Now, whenever I get too wordy at home, my husband just points at my ankle and goes, “Remember the potato incident?”
TL;DR: Hospitals are fine. My inability to describe pain like a normal human? Less fine. 🥔📚
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