There’s a Yiddish saying that Harlen Coben is fond of quoting in his books; “Der Mentsch Tracht un Gott Lacht (Man Plans and God Laughs)”. Maybe our planning for India was going too well and God needed a laugh…

On Sunday 17th November Debbie planned to meet her friends in London for lunch. She got up early and drove to Apsley, near Hemel Hempstead, where she had booked a hotel. She dropped the car off and caught the train into London. She told me it was a good lunch and wine may have been consumed. Early that evening she caught the train back to Apsley and tripped leaving the station, but picked herself up, got her bags out of the car and checked into the hotel for the night. The next day she was planning to go into the office in Dunstable and meet up with her team.

She woke in the night, in agony, and to cut a long story short it turned out she had disclocated her shoulder and fractured the head of her humerus. She suffered all night, rather than doing the sensible thing and dialing 111, and phoned me at 7am. I told her to call 111 and they directed her to the urgent treatment centre in Hemel Hempstead.

This is where our wonderful friends sprung into action. Graham gave me a lift to the station so that I could set off to recover Debbie and the car. While that was happening Jayne contacted Lisa and Marc because they live in Watford, and Marc dropped everything to get to Debbie’s hotel and take her to the UTC in Hemel. He became her personal paramedic for the morning, taking her first to Hemel and then on to A&E at Watford General, keeping the rest of the rescue posse informed with a flurry of WhatsApp messages.

The train finally got me to Apsley to collect the car from the hotel and I arrived at Watford General about 2pm and relieved Marc. At about the same time they were knocking Debbie out to re-set her shoulder. A very battered and bruised Debbie was released from Watford General around 5pm, with her right arm in a sling, and had to suffer the long drive back to Devon.

So where does that leave our plans for India? The short answer is we don’t know!

Our flight to Goa is booked for 8th January and our flight back from Mumbai is booked for 30th March and neither are refundable or flexible. At the moment we don’t know whether we will be on either or neither of them. The current medical advice is that Debbie will need to keep her arm in a sling for at least the next few weeks, so no driving or typing, which means she can’t do much work. More importantly it means she can’t get to her offices in Dunstable or Hull so no chance to get to either location’s Christmas party, or even her own retirement celebration.

Her next NHS medical appointment is 30th December, but they warned her that this may be cancelled because there are often a lot of higher priority cases at this time of year. Apparently Christmas celebrations result in a lot of people having trips and falls. We’ve arranged a private consultation next week to try to get some advice on likely treatment pathways and depending on that advice can take a view on whether to set off for India on 8th January. One thing that is certain is that she won’t be wearing a rucksack!

I’ve spent the afternoon making contingency plans. Fortunately the accommodation we have already booked can be cancelled up until the end of this year. One possibility is to still fly to Goa on the 8th January and just have a short beach holiday, then fly back. Another approach is to delay our departure and fly out later, returning on 30th March as planned. How long we stay for and what we do will depend on how Debbie’s arm is and the medical advice we receive, so its a case of missing some of the stops and more ambitious journeys and salvaging as much of our original itinerary as is sensible. Hopefully we will be able to resume our adventures as planned from mid-April when we fly to the Philipines.

Meanwhile I’m still busy packing all of the stuff we aren’t using and getting it into storage. We’ve rented a 20ft shipping container in Paignton and I’m gradually moving our house contents into it. The housing market is very quiet and we have only had one viewing by prospective tenants. Things would have been a lot more complicated if they had wanted to rent the house and we had already signed a tenancy agreement. At least if we have to delay our departure we won’t also be homeless!