This has been a medical sort of week, one way and another.

Monday we had Sophie's mysterious spots and the dreaded sore ear.

Tuesday was Em's MRI, which went very well, IV and all.

And Wednesday ... Well, Wednesday morning, at about 6am, Bobby stumbled out of the bathroom and caught his smallest toe on the doorframe with a slight scrunching noise. He lurched over to the bed, and I could see that his toe was sticking out at right angles. He staggered back to the bathroom, threw up, and passed out. Up till that point, I had not realised that people actually could faint from pain.

So by 6.30am we were in the emergency room at the local hospital.

Turned out, he'd managed to dislocate his toe (that was the painful bit) and also chip a bit of bone off it.

It was interesting to see the differences between our ER visit here, and a very similar visit we had in the US, where Bobby did almost the same thing to his other foot.

On balance, our experience here was better.

For a start, there was no form-filling, no need to call our insurance to authorise treatment, no handing over of credit card details, and no signing of endless liability waivers. Instead, all I had to do was give Bobby's name, tell the receptionist who our GP is so that she could look up Bobby's NHS number, verify our address - and voila, we were in. One minute.

While the hospital here looks a lot less glossy than the one we visited in the US did, the standard of treatment seems the same or better. Our waiting time was less, and the staff were all very attentive. We may just have been lucky with that, though. Presumably early Wednesday mornings are not peak accident-happening time.

I was a bit taken aback when the staff here assumed that if Bobby needed wheeling from place to place (eg from the x-ray department to the orthopaedic section) I would be the one to do it. At Winter Park hospital they refused to allow me to push his wheelchair to the x-ray department because of liability issues, so - since they were very busy at the time - we had to wait an hour for a nurse to arrive to do it. Much quicker and easier this way.

And of course, his treatment was all free.

So that was Wednesday.

Thursday, someone threw up in the exam I was invigilating.

And today has mercifully been free of medical disasters.

Tomorrow is our 17th wedding anniversary, and we had planned to go see Coriolanus at the Globe as groundlings. But, with Bobby's toe, standing for three hours isn't really an option, so we are going to have a fondue here with the kids, and then the two of us will go and see a movie - The Whale and The Squid - instead.

I hope the beautiful weather holds. This whole week has been absolutely glorious. Blue skies and sunshine and flowers and birds everywhere. If only England were like this all the time!