Foot Follies – Day 1

Today is not the actual first day of the Smile Side of Life Foot Follies. It is actually day number four of an adventure that started on the evening of Friday, April 28, 2017. Following a busy three-day business trip to a conference in Atlantic City, I arrived home, tired and looking forward to a quiet date night with the Love of My Life (LOML).

 I made a couple of trips back and forth to the car to retrieve my suitcase and other various bags and parcels, and deposited them in my kitchen. I flipped through the accumulation of mail on the table and saw that a package had arrived. Inside was my new garden flag, a lovely drawing of a little orange house surrounded by flowers. Kind of a comic version of my own. I took the flag out of the package and headed toward the front door to go outside and hang it.

 I opened the door. I stepped outside. I attempted to navigate the one step down from my house. It felt like someone grabbed my left leg and yanked it out from under me. In slow motion, as these things usually happen, I felt myself pitch forward, my leg rolling under me, from the thigh down. As the rolling reached my ankle, it turned inward so much that my foot seemed to turn upside down. As I threw my hands out to stop myself from landing on my face, I was aware of the sound of something snapping and cracking under me.

 “That’s odd,” I thought. I came to a stop, on my right knee, with my left leg curled strangely under me. The muscles from my hips to my toes felt overstretched, and I slowly stood up. My left foot didn’t want to support me because it was strangely numb.  “That feels weird,” I thought.

 I proceeded to step over to the garden flagpole, and put the new flag on, all the while noticing a kind of swishing and buzzing in my foot. As I started to go back into the house via the same step I had just tumbled off of, the symphony of pain began.

 It struck so fast and hard that I was instantly nauseous and breathless. Sweat began pouring down my face and I threw myself down on the couch just as I thought I might pass out.

 Dramatic, huh? I am now fully qualified to audition for any production auditioning for “the woman with the broken foot.” If I had thought to snap a continuous run of pictures of my foot, I am sure they would have qualified for medical school study. Suffice to say that the swelling was prominent and quick, looking very much like a hot dog had some how gotten under my skin. A trip to the ER seemed prudent.

 They gave me the “fast track” treatment, wheelchair, icepack, X ray and splint. “Fifth Metatarsal,” they said. “The so-called Dancer’s break.” But, apparently, these days, you don’t get any permanent setting of your broken bones. Just a splint, an ace bandage, and instructions to see a doctor for verification of the break and a permanent cast. Not a great date night for the LOML and myself.

 In keeping with the way these things always happen, it was late Friday night before I was finished in the ER. Thus, immobilization for the weekend and today’s visit to the podiatrist. I was lucky that a recently retired friend was available to drive me to the doctor:
 

• Who verified the break.
• Who congratulated me in not breaking all the way through the bone, because that would have required screws.
• Who expressed regret that it was the Fifth Metatarsal, a notoriously bad healer.
• Who expressed more regret that it could up to 12 weeks to heal.
• Who booted me instead of casting me (yay for sleeping without it and yay for showering without it!) with the caveat that weight bearing, other than a few steps in the house, would be very, very bad.Who expressed more regret on hearing that I drive a stick shift car. Well, not for weeks, now.

For the rest of the day I’ll be on the couch, boot elevated, distracting myself with the Presidential Follies on TV. That show is going to beat my Foot Follies show in the ratings.