Injury Report Status - Questionable

Injuries are inevitable. Everybody gets injured at some point. Most people can't go a week without some sort of injury. Some are just minor annoyances. Something like a paper cut. It's rare that a paper cut turns out to be life threatening but they are definitely annoying. I once got a paper cut when licking an envelope...that was seriously annoying. Along with those are the ones that are simply really infuriating. Like when you smack your head on something or bite your tongue. Biting the tongue ranks up there with one of the most irritating injuries you can inflict upon yourself. Think about it, your tongue never leaves your mouth, it's always in the same spot, you know exactly how it and the rest of your mouth functions yet you can still manage to get it between your teeth right when you bite down on that potato chip. Then you just feel like an idiot. I mean what can you say, "Gee I didn't realize my tongue was in my mouth while I was eating, darn!" No you can't, all you can do is feel dumb...and irritated.

Other times you might be afflicted by a more serious injury but hopefully it happens when you are doing something really cool or, I don't know, saving a baby from a burning building. Sports injuries fall into this category. They can be seriously painful but you have a really cool back story that you can share.

"Dan, why are you on crutches?"

"Well," says Dan, "I sprained my ankle last night in my hockey game."

"No way!" says the interested friend. "What happened?"

"I was on a two on one breakaway with my line mate and he passed the puck behind me so I twisted and reached backwards to try to slide the puck in the net. When I did that both feet went out from under me and I ended up going horizontal in the air and slammed feet first into the boards behind the net. Hence, severely twisted ankle."

That's actually a true story and one of my better ones. At least from the
perspective of not looking like a total moron. At least that injury happened when doing something super cool like putting yourself airborne to try to score a goal. In case you're wondering...I didn't score. I know that sort of puts a damper on the cool factor but the effort was amazing!

Other times? Well, other times your injuries come in a way that is, umm, not quite so exciting... or impressive. I sprained my foot last night. Not seriously but enough to cause me to limp all day today. The problem with an embarrassing injury is that you often can't hide from it. You can't not limp when you have a sprained foot. Which means you WILL be asked about it and you can't just say I sprained my foot and leave it at that, people want to know how you did it. At that point you can no longer hope to hide your idiocy.

So last night I sprained my foot in a totally uncool way. In my defense I was trying to do something cool! Ok, that's not really true. Here's the deal, I was going up and down the stairs at our house like a dozen times last night to go up to our den and back down to the family room. One of those times I decided going down the stairs one at a time like a normal person, you know, like an adult, was boring. I decided I would do some cool gymnastic like moves and fling myself down to the landing. It was one of those moves where you treat the stair handrails like parallel bars in the Olympics and you swing your feet out in front of you and skip like 8 steps. It's a super fast and fun way to travel downstairs! When done right. I'm not exactly sure what inside me said,

"Hey remember what an awesome hockey player you were and how you were able to jump over people on your skates and do spin moves around people? Remember that? You have skills man, don't go down stairs like a chump. Have some fun! Fling yourself down there!"

So, I did. Or at least I tried to. What actually happened was that as I began to fling myself gracefully thru the air, my pinkie toe on my left foot sort of dragged and got caught in the carpet and was nearly separated from his four other toe friends. I think maybe it was some sort of suicide attempt by the pinkie toe. Probably all those years at the end of the line, smaller than all the others, tired of being called useless etc, etc. Anyway, he tried to stay behind but the ever faithful ligaments connecting him to the rest of the foot wouldn't let him go. So with all their mighty ligament might they kept the little toe in his place. Meanwhile trusty ol' ligament is pretty stretched out and swollen today. As is evidenced by the fat foot and slightly blue color.

So there you have it. That's why I'm limping. It's one of those annoying injuries, even more annoying than the paper cut or the chomped tongue. It's one of those seriously painful injuries but without the really impressive story to go along with it. It's the dreaded combo; the serious pain of the super cool sports injury mixed with the stupidity of biting your own tongue. Now that's an annoying injury.