It was Monday morning. The Winter Solistice. The shortest day of the longest year. I think often of one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who, where, speaking about the Solstice, the Doctor says, “We’re halfway out of the dark.”
It was also my last day of work before taking a holiday break, so I had lots to do. I came into the morning with my to-do list ready, got my coffee and was ready to rock. Then I took a quick sidebar. Henry wanted to do an activity in the backyard with his therapist, and frankly the backyard was in no condition to be played in. With two dogs and a bunch of melting snow, we hadn’t cleaned up the…um…leavings…in a few days. So I got some poop bags and got to work.
I was about a minute away from finishing, and was walking alongside our garden box in an area that was basically a sheet of ice. Aaaaaand, I lost my footing. WHAM! Down I went. My knee went through the icy slush and into the mud. My left elbow whacked into the garden box.
Frustrated and hurting, I first focused on my smarting elbow and knee, before standing up and realizing I couldn’t feel a substantial portion of my left foot.
I started limping back to the house, at first fully figuring on picking up the last few bits of poop before going inside. My difficulty walking quickly changed my mind, and I dragged myself inside. I slowly started to regain feeling in most of my foot, but definitely could not feel my middle toe. Erin helped me get seated, and I took off my sock.
Sure enough, my middle toe was sticking ever so distinctly upward, and I could not move it. The numbness was subsiding and being replaced by intense pain. I was pretty sure it was broken.
I was a little freaked out, but mostly angry. Go figure I would manage to break my first bone a few days before Christmas. And what a perfect capper to the fantastically crappy year of 2020. Heading to urgent care after a dog poop cleanup incident.
And off to urgent care I went. Erin was awesome and helped me get my stuff together and drove me down. She and the kids dropped me off, and I got checked in. I was worried I’d be in the waiting room for hours, but luckily I got in after about 20 minutes.
The first thing the doctor did was put the toe back in place. It was hurting quite a bit being out of position, and YIKES did that little move hurt.
I wish I’d had a piece of rawhide to chew on or something. Then it was off to get X-rayed. If it was broken, I’d be looking at a few weeks recover, and if it was just dislocated, a few days or a week. Thankfully, it turned out to just be dislocated and NOT broken, so they just had to tape it up and I was on my way. A little hobbled, but at least I could get around. Before, I couldn’t put any pressure on it and was hopping around.
In a little while, I was in an Uber heading home. I was relieved to have come through that better than originally feared, even if my plans for a super productive morning were now pretty much shot. The driver told me a story about a guy she recently had to drive to surgery to have his toe amputated, so as toe troubles go, mine wasn’t really so bad.
Back home, I got back to work and was still able to get the things I needed to accomplish done, and wrapped up for the holiday at a pretty decent time, all things considered. Henry finished with his therapists, and Amelia got a nice surprise in the mail. A few weeks back, she had written a letter to Santa Claus. And today she got a letter back!
Full disclosure, I’m about to disclose some Christmas spoilers, so if you are concerned about that, please stop reading here.
Santa Claus doesn’t really…well…he doesn’t really return letters. He is super busy.
But I was able to ask my Dad, who is himself a highly experienced Santa’s helper, to help out and he came back with a fantastic response letter, complete with picture of Santa writing it.
It was AWESOME, and Amelia absolutely loved it. She read it aloud several times and talked at length about it.
With a Santa response and all of us wrapping up for break, we were in the Christmas mode, and it suddenly occurred to me that we had forgotten to get Christmas crackers. The cool paper tubes that you pull apart and that have been an English Christmas tradition for ages. We started a search and apparently everyone was sold out. Erin eventually found one place in Boulder that still had a few, so after dinner we all loaded up the car and went for a drive to look at Christmas lights and pick up crackers.
Success!
That holiday quest complete, it was back home to watch some Christmas cartoons and call it a night. For a day that started out with me facedown in the mud, holding a bag of poop and nursing what I thought was a broken toe, the day really didn’t end up so bad.
Halfway out of the dark.
