Euan McColm: The agony of my back injury is exacerbated by the utterly pathetic way I suffered it

I let out a guttural groan and freeze on the spot, trying to catch my breath and fighting the developing urge to throw up.

As in a car crash, the world turns to slow motion. The agony steadies to a throb, deep and slow like a timpani.

Then, freshly chilled by sweat, I cry out… “Help! Help me!”

The girl finds me, trembling and gripping the kitchen door for support.

“What’s happened?”

“I was,” I wince, “putting the milk back in the fridge.”

“Jesus Christ,” she says.

At 56, I’m a good decade into the period of life when the body messes with us for its own entertainment, making high-risk activities of the mundane. “You think you’re going to just tie those shoelaces, do you? Well, good luck, bucko. Good luck…”

But in my long experience of “how-the-f***-did-that-happen?” injuries, this one is of a different magnitude.

In fact it’s of two. The pain is quite unlike anything I can remember. It’s relentless and exacerbated by the slightest movement. It hurts to take the deep breaths I need to take to stop it hurting.

And, while the consequences of the injury are more severe than in the past, the cause is more pathetic than on any previous occasion.

I can accept my body telling me the quid-pro-quo for decades of inactivity is increased difficulty in the doing of stuff but all I was attempting at the precise moment agony struck, this time, was the placement of a small carton of milk inside a refrigerator. At least that time in the shower I turned funny.

I have the girl fetch me the twice-used and long-abandoned Vileda Supermop that lives inside every hall cupboard (do feel free to check, if you don’t believe me) and use it as a staff.

“You’re making a big thing of this,” she says.

“I’m in f***ing agony,” I say.

“Don’t swear,” she says, “It’s toxic. I’ve checked.”

She returns to her room and instinct takes over. I’m a survivor.

I twist the mop-head against the floor, bunching the strands into a plug, then use it to propel myself around, like a hunched and wheezing gondolier: You know, such as you might envisage in a grotesque recurring nightmare?

Now inexplicably furious, the girl leaves for the pub without saying goodbye. She is soon replaced by her younger brother, who arrives to watch the football.

Where the girl could not have been less interested in tending to her burdensome father, the boy is a nurse-in-the-making.

He brings me a drink and a broom – so that I have cross-country ski-sticks, of sorts – and asks if there’s anything else he can do.

I’m touched.

“Thanks son,” I say.

“No bother,” he says.

We sit in silence for a moment.

“There’s this place, right,” he says, “that does a salt and chilli box.”

Charlie from Casualty, here, goes on to list the contents of said box and explains that, even though the place is closer to his mum’s, they also deliver here for “like 22 quid or something, all in”. This is something he “noticed, before”.

Later, when the boy’s gone, I ski through to the kitchen with an almost empty takeaway box between my teeth. I brace myself against the washing machine and look out at the flats across the lane. There are lights on in a couple but no sign of foul play. A disappointing remake of Rear Window with Gregor Fisher as the lead.

My insomnia comes roaring back, this time driven not by anxiety but pain. A full 48 hours after the milk carton incident, I’m on a steady cocktail of paracetamol and ibuprofen, jolting awake when their effects wear off.

In the early hours of Monday morning, I ski slowly through to the kitchen. The first aid biscuit tin is empty but for plasters and a bottle of Calpol that should have been chucked out during lockdown. I neck it.

It still works.

As my incapacitation stretches, so I become increasingly difficult to be around. A barely tolerable, short-tempered man at my best, I rage at the world.

On Tuesday, I write a newspaper column while leaning on the kitchen counter, binge six Fab ice lollies, and fall out with the girl over whose responsibility it is to provide dinner not only in these specific circumstances – where whether I will ever be fully mobile again remains very much in question – but more generally.

She tells me she’s off to provide her own dinner at Taco Bell and staying at a pal’s.

Also she’s blocking me on the phone because I’m doing her head in.

Four days after I sustain the injury. I’m able to leave the flat.

Two flights of tenement stairs are a risky reintroduction to the world of the pedestrian but I survive and, like Keyser Soze at the end of The Usual Suspects, my gait becomes more steady as I move along the street.

But, although each step becomes easier, I’m conscious of every movement in a way that I would not normally be.

I’m not simply me walking down the street, I’m me trying to control a body that won’t quite do what I tell it.

I feel older than I ever have. I wonder whether this is the start of what it feels like to be properly, actually old.

I snap out of it when I meet a friend.

We buy records and eat Sri Lankan curries and with all the laughter I quite forget I’m in burning agony.

It takes a little longer than usual to climb the hill back to the flat and, by the time I’ve slumped on the sofa, the ache has returned.

The girl phones.

“Is your back better?”

“Much better, thanks, darling.”

“Great,” she replies, “I’m blocking you again, now.”

She hangs up. I take two Nurofen.