Theresa Lewis

I love writing. It is my greatest passion in life. When I write, I feel free. It opens my spirit, frees my soul and is better than any antidepressant I know of. Writing gives me the liberty of having affairs with no repercussions. I can love with complete abandon. I can discover treasures undiscovered by others. I can create my own wealth. I can toss it all to the wind if I so choose. It makes me laugh and it makes me cry on the same page. It helps me to deal with the complexities of life. It makes me realize that we are all multiple personalities. Sometimes I write nonsense and love it. Sometimes I can be dramatic and brooding, but I am always free to be me.

Here is a tale of woe for you. If toe injury stories make you feel faint, then do not read any further. This story is disturbing even to me as I write it. I am battling the nausea that keeps creeping up on me.

MY BIG TOE

When I first got married, we didn’t have much money to furnish our home so we bought discount furniture. Our first dining room table had an arborite top and hollow stainless steel pipe legs that looked like an upside down Y. Keep that image in mind as it is vital to the rest of the story.

My husband and I had planned a dinner party for eight of our friends. I had to do everything by myself because my husband was useless in the kitchen at that point. All day, I scrubbed and cleaned and prepared a variety of foods to grace the discriminating palates of our dinner guests. After placing a freshly ironed linen tablecloth on the table and setting the table with my finest crystal and silverware, I stepped back to admire my handiwork. All that was left to do before the guests arrived was to put the appetizers on the table.

I neatly arranged the pickles and olives in my divided crystal dish and rushed into the dining room to place it on the table. In my haste, I approached the table a little too quickly. In doing so, I rammed my big toe up the razor sharp hollow leg of the table. The pain went from my big toe right up to my brain in a heartbeat and caused me to scream and throw the plate of appetizers into the air. I flopped on the floor and grabbed my big toe in both hands.

My husband heard the scream and came running in to discover me sitting on the floor surrounded by pickles and broken glass and with blood squirting through my hands that were latched onto my big toe in a death grip. As blood squirted from my big toe, tears squirted from my eyes. After much coaxing, I finally got up the courage to release my grip on my big toe and take a peek at the damage. From the tip of my big toe to the first knuckle, the skin was peeled back. It looked like it had been carved into the shape of a rosebud much like a chef carves a party radish. The pain was horrific.

Since our guests were soon to arrive, I wasted no time in bandaging up my big toe and then set about to clean up the mess I had made. The bandage on my big toe was too fat and my toe was too painful for me to put my shoes on so I greeted our guests in my bare feet. The first man to arrive approached me too closely to greet me. He stepped on the tip of my mangled big toe. I managed to stifle my scream of agony, but I could not control the tears that  spurted out.

When asked what happened to my bandaged foot, my husband nonchalantly stated that I had stubbed my toe. As my big toe pulsed and throbbed right up to my brain, he will never know how badly I wanted to shove his head up the open ragged leg of the table.