My Poor Little Piggy

Fact: Marble floors are very hard and very smooth
Fact: Water tends to make marble floors slippery
Fact: When one has wet feet on a marble floor, one should avoid any actions that require even the most minute traction
Fact: When one ignores these facts, one ends up in a lot of pain

Yesterday morning after my shower, I was walking across the bedroom to the closet which requires me to pass by the foot of the bed. For some reason while at the foot of the bed, I felt the need to pull something off the bed. I lost my balance and both my feet went sliding under the bed and into the middle bed legs, causing me to run through my entire list of favorite expletives and causing Manuel to laugh.

I tried bending my toes which worked a bit in spite of the shooting pain and decided they weren’t broken and the pain would subside in an hour or so. I finished getting ready for work and decided to wear my Crocs as they would be the only footwear that would not put pressure on my foot. By the time I got to the office, I was leaning against the stair rail just to get upstairs. An hour later I pulled off the sock and there was my swollen purple toe looking back at me and I decided it was time to take it all a bit more serious.

I got to the hospital and was sent to Orthopedics who, without even looking at my foot or listening to what had happened decided I needed to see a surgeon. I think that is just the default answer to any foreigner with an injury, sending them to a surgeon. It was all very Grey’s Anatomy, but suddenly the thought of someone cutting open the little piggy that stayed home was not so amusing. I waited about 40 minutes for the surgeon to arrive, during which time my entire foot was going numb and I start jumping to worst case scenarios and in my mind my foot was being amputated just below the hip.

Finally the surgeon arrived to take a look. He was not McDreamy or McSteamy, but he did determine my toes – by now more of them were changing color – were not broken but possibly fractured so I was put in a wheelchair and sent for some x-rays which showed no fractures of any kind. I am not sure what was more painful at that moment, my foot or the fact that 27 days after I turned 41, I was being wheeled around the hospital like a little old man.

I am now on my anti-inflammatory medication, right foot elevated and a nice shade of blue slowly but surely taking over more of my podiatric real estate. I am not supposed to walk for the next 2 days unless it is absolutely necessary, something I don’t think I will have a problem sticking to as even walking across the living room to the washroom takes me about a minute.

But I did get some real cool x-ray photos of my foot to go along with my snowboarding vacation x-rays which include broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, two concussions and a sprained ankle. Souvenirs I collected over the years in Val Thorens. Oh yeah, and there’s the broken collar bone pics from when I got hit by a car in Amsterdam, but that is another story.