Wrangler Dani

So, Saturday night I broke my foot. Well, I didn’t break it per se, but it gets me more sympathy if I say that. I was walking out of CostCo, so dejected that it had closed moments before so I couldn’t buy a box of granola bars the size of a large microwave, that I didn’t look where I was going, and totally ate it.

You know those curbs in parking lots, with the tree in the middle? Yeah. I hate those now. I think I stepped in it or over it or something, but whatever it was, it was not successful. The best part is, I fell against an expensive-looking SUV, who immediately started alarming in protest, fell back against Rocky, who just shared some his dirt with my shoulder, and hit the ground, feeling sexy and oh-so-awesome. Then I noticed that my foot hurt. I figured I’d just made it unhappy with all this falling around, and my upbringing has taught me nothing if not the mantra “walk it off”.

So walk it off I did. Trouble was, it didn’t really “walk off”. I was mid-Target, staring stupidly at a display of half-price throws, wondering why on earth I was there and why my right foot was still attached. I finally left with random assortment of pain-induced cravings and nothing that I had originally planned to go there for. For instance, nothing would do but to buy a Towel for Two and some breakfast sausage. I don’t know.

Anyway, I made it home on Cruise Control, (stupid me, didn’t even think about the Advil in my console, but suffered drug-less,) and as soon as I got up the stairs, fell on the couch and cried.
I called my mom and dad, part of which made me feel better, (“you’ll be OK, use ice, take Advil,”) but part of which made me feel more alone, and sorry for myself for being alone. Then I called Adam and promptly cried into his voicemail and felt more alone. He called back later and I cried again. It sucked.

The next day it was so much worse that I decided a field trip to an x-ray machine was in order. Thank God for Brent and Kim, who kept me laughing and waited three hours in the ER waiting room without complaint. They even stopped at Starbucks on our way… people after my own heart.

(Oh, side story about the ER. It’s inherently dramatic. Seriously. When we got there, an older man with a large bloody bandage around his neck was screaming into the windows that seperate the lobby from the nurses – “There’s injured people out here! Come out and see us!” To which an eerily empty back room did not respond. Apparently they were short-staffed and didn’t her the buzzer… rather normal – but if it had been a midnight Thursday instead of a sunny Sunday morning, it would have been decidely horror-movie-esque. Anyways.)

I finally got x-rayed by a short Philipino man with a thick accent and a sense of humor. When he asked me for my last name (which is, for those who don’t know, great fun to confuse telemarketers with, but on the flip side, tough for the rest of the world, too,) he nodded at my ring. “Bet you’ll be glad to trade that name in,” he said, smiling at me.

Finally, I heard that it was not broken. (Hallelujah!) but maybe hairline fractured, or maybe just sprained in a way that only a klutz of mythical propensity could accomplish. They sent me off with advice to take painkiller (duh) and ice it.

Kim tried to talk me into a “fashion cane” at CVS, but none of her royal-blue-checkered whiles would fool me. Brent also thought that icing my eyes might be just the ticket, but once again I held firm in my resolve to be normal. (ha.)

When Adam got home, he took good care of me, bringing me anything I needed, worrying as only the famous eyebrows can, and ordering in Pizza and Heineken, which completely hit the spot and healed it by leaps and bounds on first bite.

The moral of this story is:
Look out for curbs with trees in them. Very dangerous.