You can’t break a bone from walking, I thought, one recent Monday morning as I was walking to work and rolled my right ankle.

Usually when this happens, I hop a bit from the twinge and carry on walking. This time, though, the pain was so intense, I thought I was going to pass out.

I’d been walking with a colleague and another strode by: they offered to prop me into school as it was still ten minutes’ walk away, but I politely declined and hobbled on, wincing.

Our school nurse gave me an ice pack and painkillers, and told me to travel home when it wasn’t rush hour to get it x-rayed.

My school is in London and I live in Brighton so getting home was a trial I won’t describe and, until my daughter insisted, I wasn’t planning on the x-ray because it couldn’t be broken, I explained to her, because you can’t break your ankle walking. But in the end I did, and it was, so you can.

It went from bad to worse. Crutches hurt your hand bones. Within a day, the pressure on my left hip re-injured something spinal I’d dislodged or torn a year before, pressing on a nerve.

Teaching online all day every day made a four-year shoulder and arm issue flare up from laptop, mouse and screen use. Ironically, this year my aim was to focus on my health, and there I sat with back pain, shoulder pain and a broken ankle, shaking my head in disbelief.

I had no idea how much my life would be affected, and for how long, never having broken a weight-bearing bone before.

Going down narrow stairs on crutches is terrifying. Having a shower on one leg is potentially lethal. Sleeping is affected because it hurts to lie any way at all and the duvet is too heavy on your foot.

Dressing, moving around, answering the door and crutch-hopping with no upper-body strength to speak of require time, thought, caution and heroism.

Breakfast must be eaten beside the toaster and tea drunk by the kettle because you can’t carry a cup, a plate or anything else with two crutches.You can’t fill a saucepan with water and lift it to the stove.

You can’t change your bedsheets, vacuum, sweep the floor or bend down to pick things up. You can’t do much at all, especially in the early stages: you need to keep your foot up, preferably above the height of your heart, definitely above your hip, and that is not possible when you’re teaching online every day.

Seven weeks later, I’m out of the moon boot and tentatively walking around. Sleeping is easier, stairs are manageable, and tea is enjoyable in the sitting room once more. But it’s Pesach soon.

How am I going to I clean the kitchen cupboards and fridges when I can’t stand on a chair? How can I vacuum the house, the sofa, the car, the drawers?

Take rubbish out? Bring the Passover shopping back from London when I can’t carry and can’t drive?

Change over the kitchen? I can get the kids to help but they have courses and jobs. Pay a cleaner, maybe? By the time I explain what to do I could have done it myself.

It’s disgraceful how little I’ve thought of this previously — how little we all think of this — in a world made for the able. I have so much more sympathy for and awareness of those with disabilities now.

What did they do in the olden days? I always ask myself. Live in a community is the answer. Not in a place where neighbours look at you hopping to the car with a vacuum cleaner and say, “You’re doing what? Blimey, woman. Leave it. Who cares?”

You know who cares? I do.

So please, this year — every year — spare a thought for those less able, permanently or temporarily, and offer your help if you can.

My physical niggles will heal (hopefully). The radial nerve flare-up has calmed down, the fibula is sore but healing, and the back is achy rather than debilitating, but for many, their restrictions are permanent and they face a world, daily, that is not made with them in mind. How do they manage with Pesach?

I have no idea. But once this leg of mine is better, I’ll make it my business to find out.