I knew this would happen

Twenty years ago come May, I was hit in the head with a taxi and major thoroughfare in quick succession. I broke several bones in my face, scraped off a lot of skin, bruised myself to buggery, broke my hand and a few ribs and cracked some other bits besides.

In a way it was good that I had the broken hand because I had very obviously been in an accident. There were some nice things, like the woman who followed me down a long street until we neared the police station and then gently sought my attention to tell me that I deserved better and that she would come with me to the police if I wanted to make a complaint. I made sure that I told her I thought she was wonderful and brave before I told her I'd been hit by a taxi. I still wish I'd felt up to hugging her.

There was a little girl in the pet shop who lifted up bunnies and kittens for me to pat because they made her feel better and she guessed I needed something cheering. When her mother told her to stop bothering the lady, I confess I may have laid on the 'But it's really helping me, what a lovely child!' a little more thickly than a good person would have.

And there were annoying things, like the shopkeepers who knew me, had known me for ages, recognised that it was me, and yet still treated me as though I was a moron because I couldn't talk fluently and looked bad.

Last Friday, I paid a nice surgeon to hammer out two wisdom teeth and chisel some bone from the roof of my mouth. Since then, I have looked like a lopsided squirrel and had a splendid bruise down one cheek. And I can't talk without gagging on the stitches.

Primed by my earlier experience, I prepared a notebook. It contains multiple useful pages:
* I had an operation on my mouth and cannot talk for a bit.
* It looks worse than it feels, thanks for asking.
* Yes
* No
* Oh For Fuck's Sake!
* Can I put $10 on my Opal Card?
* Ask X, Y, Z (people at work with checkboxes to point to)
* It's very good to see you.
* Can I have a chocolate milk, please?

Armed with those nine pages, I have navigated a surprising percentage of my life, partcularly since going back to work yesterday. This has been helped by hardware changes in my absence, which have allowed me to do a surprising amount of my job with only NO and OH, FFS!

But of course, I occasionally have to talk. And because my left cheek is still swollen and stiff with bruising, and because my tongue cannot hit the roof of my mouth and I don't want to move my lips very much, I sound like a lisping, nasal squirrel impersonator.

Now at work, this is merely a source of comedy. And rightly so. Because it is funny. I'm also still a bit stoned from the general and all the opiates: drugs and I have never mixed well. They know this and were prepared. People laughing is perfectly rational, if cruel ;-)

But four times today other people listened to my lispy squirrel voice and looked at my swollen face and decided 'Oh, you must be stupid!'

Which just shits me. Not because someone thinks *I* am stupid (I'm five feet one and girly looking, people have made that mistake on spurious gender assumptions my whole life) but because it reminds me how needlessly fucking frustrating it must be to permanently have any one of the hundreds of physical conditions that mean you can't talk fluently.

So if this ever happens again (and given my track record, that's not unlikely), I have a new plan. I am going to download a voice synthesiser a la Stephen Hawking (maybe even the same voice) and I am going to program my series of responses, PLUS brief lectures on the mechanics of particle physics*, which I will play while looking at them with touching, swollen sincerity.

That'll learn 'em.



* Cribbed entirely from the work of Professor Hawking (I only 'get' physics up to Marie Curie), who I suspect will grant permission because there are jokes in A Brief History of Time, which means he can find comedy anywhere. Also, on cruising his essays last night when I dreamt up this plan, I found this regular disclaimer:

Note that there may be incorrect spellings, punctuation and/or grammar in this document. This is to allow correct pronunciation and timing by a speech synthesiser.

which is my new favourite example of why appropriately idiosyncratic grammar exists.