RSD - sudden fall, slow climb back
(continued)

Minutes later, with my dangling left arm just beginning to register pain, I arrived back at Yes Tor and sought help. The stranger spread his sweater on a rock and sat me down with a mug of coffee from his flask. He found the First Aid kit in my rucksack and took out a triangular bandage to make a sling. Not yet acknowledging the seriousness of my injury, I asked him to walk with me to the car park where an ambulance could meet me. I dialled 999 on my mobile phone and told them my plan.
"How long will it take you to get to this car-park?" they asked.
"About an hour", I guessed.
"We'll send the Air Ambulance", they decided.
Within minutes we heard the chatter of the approaching helicopter and marvelled as the pilot manoeuvred it improbably onto an untidy rock pile. Minutes later I was in the air and the moor became a relief-map spread out below me.

At Plymouth's Derriford Hospital I learned that mine was the fifth broken arm they had seen since that morning's frost had turned the local streets into booby traps. My accident was one among many and, for all the expected inconvenience, still only a broken arm. I set my face to make the best of the coming six weeks, but that was excessively optimistic. I had broken the top off the left distal radius, close to the wrist, and the first attempt at setting it did not work. Ten days later I had it re-set and wired together. The pain was severe and, as the weeks wore on, it persisted and even got worse. After the wires were removed and the final plaster was put on, my arm swelled so much that the plaster had to be slit to relieve the pressure. When the plaster came off it revealed a pitiful stiff and crooked hand and the first angry signs of RSD.

I had never heard of Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, so the Registrar had to write the words down for me to show the physiotherapist. At least I had a name to put to my painful condition. The import of the diagnosis did not strike until one of my sons surfed the Internet for information and phoned me in some concern.
"This is a condition you definitely don't want to have", he said.
When I looked it up myself I saw what he meant. RSD was first described during the American Civil War when doctors noticed how some injuries got worse at a stage when recovery ought to have been almost complete. Nobody has yet explained why it happens to some people and not to others, but it is not at all rare. The symptoms are caused by a mis-firing of the sympathetic nervous system, which pours chemicals into the injured area, creating hot pain and provoking paralysis. The sympathetic nervous system is part of the body's natural defences and warns us of trouble by stimulating pain. It also controls the healing processes that repair cuts and fractures. When healing is complete the processes should switch off but, in RSD sufferers, they continue firing and create problems of their own.