This Story Will Make You Feel Better About Yourself…
Breaking a toe is seriously one of the stupidest injuries you can have. There is no way to tell someone about your injury and make it sound cool. It just makes you feel stupid.
I broke my toe on a Wednesday. It was just like every other day, except for the excruciating pain in my little toe. I had woken up late that morning and run downstairs to shower. I had almost made it to the water when I slammed my toe into the side of our bathtub. Naturally, I thought I had just stubbed my toe really bad, but when I felt it, I could feel that the bone was shoved back into my foot.
I didn’t think it was that big of a deal at first. I was going to take a shower, but it hurt really bad to stand. I decided I needed to run a bath because my toe hurt so badly, so I sat down and turned the water down to the faucet below. I sat there waiting for the tub to fill, in absolute pain, but I just couldn’t sit there. I turned off the water and cried for a good five minutes because there was no way I could do anything. Everything else in my mind was ruined. My toe hurt like a thousand cars had run it over and, therefore, I couldn’t do anything.
I decided to get out of the tub and tell my mom about it before she left for school so I crawled out of the tub to go sit on the couch and cry there.
There is no denying that I was full on bawling my eyes out when my mom came down the stairs (because there was no way I was going up the stairs with my toe hurting so bad). I thought I’d take the rational approach on explaining how my toe felt, but my mouth screamed out instead, “I think I broke my toe!”
After I cried some more and my mom had called the hospital to schedule me an appointment, my dad came down the stairs and just sighed. I knew it was really stupid that I stubbed my toe so bad I thought I broke it, and I certainly didn’t need him around to confirm it. All he did was sigh and question me in a “that’s so stupid” voice, and then he went back to bed.
I don’t really remember a lot about going to the hospital, only that, I now had enough tears to make an ocean and my toe still hurt really badly. I do remember crawling up the stairs to get clothes and my phone, but that’s all.
When we got to the hospital, my mom dropped me off at the entrance and I found the nearest bench to plop down on to wait for her. We walked in together (well she walked, I hobbled). We only were sitting down for a few minutes before they called me back to the patient room. At this point I was crying not only because it still hurt, but also because I was realizing how funny and stupid this injury really was.
The nurse did all the normal stuff when you get a checkup and asked me how I hurt my toe. When the doctor came, she confirmed that I needed an x-ray to confirm that I had dislocated it (at this point, they thought I had just dislocated it or sprain it).
I hobbled down the hallway, trying to keep up with the x-ray technician who walked a thousand miles an hour. When we got to the room she had me lie down on the x-ray table and do a few different poses to try to get different views of my toe.
Back in the patient room, the doctor came by and confirmed that I had dislocated my toe. She then revealed that I would have to wear this ugly half shoe/half boot thing on my foot for a minimum of a month. But first, she wanted to get another x-ray to just make sure that I didn’t break it.
So again, I hobbled back to the x-ray room, except this time the technician walked a little slower (she finally realized that I was kind of hurt or something). When I laid down on the table she told me that she would have to do some taping. Let me tell you, when an x-ray technician tells you that they need to tape your toes to the table to separate them for a better x-ray, it’s going to hurt. She wrapped the tape around all the toes except my injured ones and pulled them to the side of the table and taped them there; this kind of hurt because there was resistance against my injured toe. Next, she wrapped tape to my pinky toe and pulled it to the side of the table like the other. Man, did it hurt! I couldn’t help but whimper and squirm when she did it. The moment when she released my toes was heaven, even though my toe still hurt.
We could finally go home after the 2½ hour doctor visit. Since we were in town, we stopped at Subway so I wouldn’t starve for lunch (#winning).
When we got home, I was hysterical. My injury was a joke. And I was missing school for it. How dumb. For the rest of the day, I just slept and laughed at my stupid toe.
Looking back, I realize that there will never be any cool way to tell people how I broke my toe, and the boot/shoe is definitely chic (SARCASM!). On the upside, at least I now have a really wicked bruise!