Thursday 15 December 2011

crippled and cracked....


Working instore is pretty hard on the body for someone who usually spends their days sat in meetings drinking coffee.  After three days instore last week, I was a broken man.  Now it turns out that I am quite literally a broken man after my time down in Oxford last week: I've cracked a toe.

Like all good accidents, it's got nothing to do with working in the shop and may be a tiny bit booze related.  As I was staying with friends, we tended to take advantage of our time together in the evenings to have a few drinks after work and a glass of wine or two with dinner.  Nothing too dramatic, but enough that I'd wake up in the morning feeling a touch groggy and would look forward to my 30 minute walk into work to blow away the cobwebs.

Friday morning was typical: I woke up an hour or so before my alarm and decided that I needed to pay a visit to the bathroom.  Barely opening my eyes, I stumbled out of the bedroom and down the corridor.  Unfortunately for me, I must have lurched to my right as I did so, and I ended up aiming a hefty kick with my bare foot at the huge terracotta plant pot sitting on the landing.  I don't even really remember hopping up and down much, went about my business and then went back to bed for a bit more sleep.  My foot was a bit sore when I got up, but nothing to worry about.  In fact, I was more worried about the self-inflicted mess I'd made on the nail of my big toe than I was about anything else.  I am reknowned as a butcher with the nail scissors and should not be allowed to own them, never mind use them. 

Anyway.

I took my lunch at about 2pm, and realised that after several hours standing up, my foot was now pretty sore.  I took off my shoe and sock and saw that my little toe and half of my foot had turned black with bruising.  Ouch.  By the end of the day, as well as being sore, the toe itself was pretty swollen.

Obviously, I still went for a 5 mile run on Saturday morning, but oddly that seemed to be okay and just walking in ordinary shoes was causing me more bother.  Now, I've cracked ribs, fingers and assorted other bones in my hand before, and I had a pretty good idea that it wouldn't actually make all that much difference in treatment terms whether my toe was broken or just bruised (apart from healing time), so I put it out of my mind as best I could.  As the swelling subsided though, I could see a definite kink in my toe, so figured I'd better just double-check that assumption with the doctor.

When making the appointment, I was pleased that this time I had the gumption to refuse an appointment with the idiot doctor I'm actually registered with: he's famously irascible, and when I saw him about the boxer's fracture on the side of my hand a while back, he dismissed me from his office as a time-waster and that it couldn't possibly be broken.  When I went back to see another doctor a couple of months later when my hand was still troubling me, she told me immediately that it was broken and that it was a shame I hadn't come in earlier when they could do something about it.  Grrr.  This time, idiot doctor was the first appointment I was offered.  I nearly took it, but then asked when the next appointment was.... next slot, same doctor.  At this point, I just asked to see someone else, and happily signed up to see the trainee instead (they're almost never busy, as working in my dad's surgery years ago has taught me... especially if they have a foreign sounding name.  They are, of course, usually excellent doctors and as keen as mustard to make a good impression on all patients.  Take a tip from me: always worth seeing).

So yeah.  The long and the short of it is that my toes is probably cracked.  It will be swollen and painful for quite a long time, and will also feel cool to the touch, but as long as it doesn't get infected, then it should be okay and there's nothing much else anyone can do.

Oh, one final piece of advice though: I should apparently try and avoid hitting it on anything else for a few months, as that will likely prove to be excruciatingly painful.

No shit, Sherlock.

Stupid body. 

I suppose that means that you'll have to put me down as a doubt for the 3rd round matches of the FA Cup.

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