This has been a difficult week.

It started quite well in the lead up to our Year 12 graduation. Certficates, reports and portfolios were ready. The Dux shield was ready, the prizes had been bought and the pens were in for engraving.

Then the pattern of luck changed with a short stroll down to the engravers to pick up the pens at the scheduled time. They weren’t ready and the engraver said they’d take another fifteen minutes to finish them.

What would I do? I decided to go across the road and visit the other campus, as I hadn’t been there for a few weeks and it would give me achance to check in on how our IT courses were going.

So I checked the traffic and the road was clear. Even better than usual because I could walk across the road at a leisurely pace. Unfortunately I didn’t notice that there was a difference in level between the road and the cycleway and tripped on the slight incline.

Not usually a problem as I never fall over but I completely lost my footing and fell face first into the footpath. Let me tell you that in a face vs pavement match the pavement will always be the winner.

The result was a bleeding brow and lacerated nose and the whole left side of my face is swollen and covered with abrasions.

A really lovely woman and man stopped to help me and called work as I didn’t have a mobile with me and had no way to contact my family. My colleagues came to check and then called my daughter-in-law, as this was a number they had in their phones because she had been a previous employee.

The helpful strangers stayed with me until the ambulance arrived and my daughter-in-law and I were off to the ambulance (re-united with my handbag and mobile as another colleague had brought it down to me).

What impressed me most about my accident was the kindness of all the strangers who stopped to check if I was OK while we were waiting for the ambulance.

The ambulance took us to Sydney Hospital where I was checked for concussion, had my woulds dressed and was given a tetanus shot. My son and daughter arrived to stay with me till I was cleared to go home.

Tomorrow I am off to get new glasses as I also managed to scratch a large part of the left lens and am currently seeing life in a rather blurred way.

The ambulance officers and the hospital staff were lovely but it was all the people walking past wh stopped to check on me who most touched me that day. Like Blanche Dubois I can now say that I “depended on the kindness of strangers”