saint-louise's Diaryland Diary
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He who does not feel pain seldom believes it is felt.
Last week turned out to be full of fun, hilarity, and high excitement!
Or a steady stream of small amounts of pain. I get them confused sometimes.
First, on Monday at 7 am, I fell down the stairs in the parking garage at my office. This is the same Garage of Woe where my car was broken into and my stereo stolen, I�ve gotten several flat tires, my battery has failed, and I�ve locked my keys inside dangling from the ignition. This time, I merely turned back to retrieve something I thought I had forgotten in my car, and ended up twisting my right ankle so badly it made me proud of my commitment to quality in pain without causing permanent, potentially-expensive injury. The ensuing scene involved much writhing, swearing, chortling (at the thought of what the falling down bit must have looked like), tears (because it hurt, damn it), and eventual limping into work like the stalwart, dedicated trooper I am.
(Insert more chortling here.)
The up side of my fall is that I managed to keep from spilling even a drop of coffee from my travel mug. I pay attention to my priorities while careening to my death. Or to my twisty ankle. Apparently, I get those confused, too.
Tuesday and Wednesday dawned. The world could witness me limping, bitching, moping, watching my ankle turn ever deeper shades of blue and purple. On one side, my mother was insisting that it could be broken, and what if I walked on it for several weeks, causing irreparable damage, and I�d end up lame, pathetic, unemployed, manless, sexless, and emitting a slightly unpleasant odor until I died alone and bitter, wallowing in the spoils of my obstinacy.
On the other side, OH was telling me it was going to be fine, and to stop whining, for the love of god, or he was going to go gibbering mad and couldn�t be held responsible for his actions after that.
The offspring just liked to show my puffy, blackened ankle to her friends now and then, so they could recoil, giggle together, and feel superior in their bravery and lack of physical deformities.
My conclusion was to realize that I already knew it was not, in fact, a serious injury. Not even a bad sprain. But I kept my sullen silence and hoped that it would turn out to be something really dreadful, so OH would have to carry me into the emergency room late at night while I feebly objected, and I could feel satisfied at his contrition while not actually accepting it.
It should be noted that my sense of vengeance falls somewhere between any scene from a Jane Austen novel and blatant perverseness.
On Thursday, as I adjusted to my life as an invalid, I kept an appointment with my dentist. He cheerfully pumped me full of Novocain, happily started to drill on my teeth until we both realized (I being more convinced than he) that I wasn�t quite numb enough yet, fairly chirped while he shot me up again, and might have died from the hysterics he got while informing me that I was on the verge of needing a root canal, my tooth had cracked almost in two, and this was going to call for another crown.
He and the hygienists had a rollicking time picking out the level of discoloring they should have the crown molded in to match my other teeth.
The receptionist couldn�t keep the joy from her voice when she told me I�d have another $350 to pay out of pocket.
I went back to work, numb from mid-cheek to lower jaw. After a couple of hours of trying to get my co-workers to understand what I was saying through the drool, I set my mind on eating lunch, attempting to control the half-paralysis of my mouth and looking quite a bit like horses do when you hold out a bunch of oats and their lips do that wobbly, snuffly thing over your hand. I gave up after consuming two bites of overcooked vegetables and set aside the rest of the afternoon to wallow in self-pity while I waited for the numbness to abate and the gnawing ache to set in.
One of my co-workers offered to stomp on my toe to take my mind off of my tooth, but I reminded her that in light of my twisted ankle, putting my other foot out of commission would do little to cheer me up.
Unless I got a little wagon to roll around in, pulled by a Great Dane. Oh! Oh! Or a sled with a whole TEAM of dogs. They could drive me from meeting to meeting, and I�d train them to bite people who suggested project-direction I didn�t like.
I knew I could find a silver lining, if I just applied myself.
2:57 p.m. - 2004-07-09
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------