Broken Foot

(Warning: this is a long entry. Read if you wish. There is little mention of the kids or Kip.)

Last Wednesday I broke my foot. I wasn't doing anything unusual. I was trying to put William in time-out. And it broke my foot. See if I try to discipline him again!

We had a good morning that day. We went to our singing group at 10am and sang songs about apples and squirrels and autumn. Then, we came home to make some lunch. The kids decided to watch 'the horsey show' while I put lunch together (Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron). I let them do it so I could have some peace and put together some really good bagel and veggie sandwiches for me and William and a hot dog for Anna. Then, William had a meltdown. He threw a little fit on the floor because he wanted the show off. There were just a few minutes left at that point and Anna wanted to watch it. Her hot dog wasn't done, so I wanted to let her. I got sick of hearing William slam his bus-shaped bin of Legos into the hearth and went over to stop him. I didn't feel up to carrying him all the way to the staircase to have his time-out, so I thought I would just swing him onto the recliner. I grabbed him under the arms and went to swing and something went wrong. My angle was totally off and he slammed into my left leg instead of the recliner. It twisted under me and something snapped. The pain was intense. I let him drop as I fell to the floor and tried to straighten my legs under me. As I lay there gasping and moaning in pain William crawled over to me and said urgently that we needed to go to the hospital. "What did I do to him?" I thought in terror. I didn't drop him that hard - I really thought he should be OK.

"Are you hurt?" I asked him.

"No, YOU are," he said.

Oh, what a sweet boy. He really cared. Of course, if he hadn't been acting like a ninny I wouldn't have been lying on the floor in agonizing pain in the first place.

I convinced him to sit at the table and eat his lunch after he turned off the movie. It had reached the credits while I writhed in agony below the TV. (I think Anna was still watching it.) I forced myself to hop to the stove and turn off the burner under Anna's hot dog which had miraculously turned itself and kept from burning all in one spot, although it was a little dark in a couple places. I then tried to sit at the table and eat the sandwich I had really been looking forward to just a few minutes before. Instead, I had to grab a nearby grocery sack and try not to puke in it. Eventually, I called Kip and begged him to come home from work to drive William to preschool and take me to the Urgent Care. He got to eat my sandwich.

I spent about 2 hours at the Urgent Care. When the doctor finally saw me he said he would send me off to x-ray. I informed him that I was 5 months pregnant and he said he would check. They decided not to x-ray. He suggested I go home and see if it got better and if it didn't they could x-ray me in a couple days.

I wasn't happy with that option.

I spent the next two days in a fair amount of pain. It really did get a lot better, but I couldn't moved all of my toes and I just wanted to know if it was broken or not and what to do to get it better. So, on Friday I called my OB and they said to go ahead with the x-ray. Back I went to the Urgent Care. (My PCP recently moved to another city and I haven't bothered getting a new one since I see my OB every month anyway, so the Urgent Care was the best option for getting a quick doctor's visit in, even though I'm not fond of the place in general.)

This time I was there three hours. I waited an hour to get in. Then, I waited an hour for the x-ray people to take me from the exam room. Finally, the technician rolled me down the hall in a wheel chair, stopped it next to a wall and walked a few more feet down the hall and around the corner. He then did some computer stuff asking me questions from around the corner from time to time in an Asian accent that was hard to understand without the challenge of not being able to see him. He eventually reappeared and pushed me into the x-ray room and took some pictures of my ankle. Then, back we went to the exam room.

A few minutes later, there he was again. The doctor had apparently asked him to x-ray my foot since that was where the pain was and there was nothing wrong with my ankle. Back we went to the x-ray room. He took foot pictures and then wheeled me into the hall facing the wall next to the corner around which sat his desk. He went to his desk and was there an annoyingly long time. I amused myself by examining the contents of my purse and creating a 'toss' pile of the junk I found. Finally, he came back into view and handed me a packet labeled "x-ray copies." I assumed that this meant my foot had been broken. I was right. The doctor told me to stay off the foot and to ice it frequently and gave me a phone number for the orthopedic specialists. After he left, the nurse came in to wrap my foot and give me a nearly knee-high boot to wear. It took her almost 10 minutes just to get the boot on me and my comfort level with her kept dropping as she grabbed long velcro straps and wondered aloud where they were supposed to attach and then swore to me she had done this before. In her defense, she was very pleasant and kind and the boot is annoying to put on. Eventually, she succeeded in applying it and I walked out to my car. She wanted to wheel me out, but I just wanted out of there, so I took off while she was out of the room and said goodbye to her as I passed her in the hallway.

On Monday I took my booted self to the Orthopedic specialists. They do a triage sort of deal in the afternoons and the office was crowded with moms accompanying their football-playing sons for examination of their sports injuries. I figured it would take another couple hours to get through, but they had my name called by the time I finished the paperwork and the doctor appeared as soon as I had the boot off. He opened my x-rays and looked at them in silence for a moment. Then, he turned to me and asked me where the break was. The Urgent Care doctor had tried to point it out to me, but where he pointed just looked like normal space between bones to me. Apparently, it looked normal to the specialist, too. After looking hard at all the x-rays for a few moments, he figured out what they were seeing. There was a small break on the end of one of the bones on the side of my foot. It was nothing to worry about, in his opinion. He suggested I wear the boot for a few weeks while it healed, mostly to prevent myself from damaging it more (since my children seem compelled to step on or bump my foot whenever it is unprotected). He said it would be fine to walk without the boot around the house as long as the pain level wasn't too bad.

Wahoo! This was exactly what I wanted to hear. No cast. No surgery. No crutches. Just try not to re-damage it and elevate and ice it when the pain gets too bad. The boot seems a little conspicuous, but I can live with that. Things are looking up. I may even attempt to hobble around a grocery store tomorrow so we can eat something other than canned and frozen foods. Some produce could be nice--and we're dangerously low on cheese (a staple in my pregnant state).