When I was newly married, I wanted to do everything right. Every time I heard or read of something that would improve the quality of our lives, I tried to implement it in our home. One such device that I heard of was a humidifier. The article said it would balance the humidity in the air and was necessary for Canadian homes because central heating was notorious for drying out the air in the home during the winter months. The article even listed a series of symptoms that would indicate that the air was too dry in the house.
I was surprised to see that we had suffered from everything from dried snots to electrified hair and clothes that produced alarming shocks to the skin. Now that I knew that there was a fix for these winter annoyances, I just had to get a humidifier.
The humidifier was quite a large machine and once I brought it into the house, my dilemma was now trying to find the perfect place to put such a large boxy machine in such a small area. I think I tried it in every room in the house before finally ending up leaving it in the hallway downstairs. That seemed to be the only place where we weren’t constantly banging into it in the dark of night. It took a while to get used to having it in the hallway, but in time it seemed like that it had been there all along.
My husband was not a very patient person at the best of times. The thing he hated most was having to wait for someone or something. That is the way it was one day as we were getting ready for work. No matter how hard I tried to be ready before him, he always seemed to be in the car before me. A wait of five minutes was tolerated, but nothing longer than five minutes.
One Monday, it seemed that everything that could go wrong to delay me, did. My curling iron refused to heat up. I had forgotten to press my uniform for work, I made the coffee, but didn’t even have time to have a sip of mine. While I was in the bathroom, I heard my husband call back to me that he was ready and would wait for me in the car. I felt heartsick. I knew it would take me some time to finish getting ready. I knew he would start yelling at me for keeping him waiting and I didn’t want to start my day off by being belittled. It was a horrible way to start the day. I scrambled into my roughly ironed clothes and ran downstairs in my open-toe slippers. I rushed to get my coat and hat on and was just about to pull my boots on when I remembered that I had forgotten to take my lunch bag from the fridge. I dropped my boot and ran into the kitchen, grabbed my lunch and ran like a gazelle back down the hall.
Somehow, my naked toes got caught in the framework of the humidifier as I sped past it. The lurch broke my stride and catapulted me headlong into the wall. I nearly dashed my brains out from the force of the impact with the wall. I knew I was in deep trouble. An agonizing pain shot up from my left baby toe, it traveled across all the intricate pathways of my brain in a nano second and caused me to feel faint. I clung to the wall and practically peeled the wallpaper off with my fingernails as I slid down to my knees on the floor. I took a long, deep breath and pulled my boots on without looking at the damage I had done to my baby toe.
The drive to work was mind destroying. In the foreground of my mind, I was focused on trying not to vomit from the pain. In the background of my mind, I was silently screaming at my husband, telling him to shut up about the long lines of traffic that he swore were set up just to make him late for work. I had heard his tirade about the traffic every day, but today it really pissed me off. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t even bear to tell him what had just happened to me. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth to speak, I would surely puke all over myself. My head throbbed and my foot throbbed. I knew I could feel my foot bleeding inside my boot.
When my husband dropped me off at work, I waited until he was out of sight and I took a bus to the hospital. I didn’t know how severe my injury was, but I needed some strong pain killers if I was going to make it through the day at work.
I hobbled into the emergency department of the hospital and explained my painful predicament to the triage nurse who took me in immediately. She helped me get the boot off my swollen left foot. Here is where it gets a bit messy. My last three toenails had been ripped almost entirely off and my baby toe was indeed broken, as I had suspected. I asked the nurse if she could put a cast on it. I thought that was a reasonable question. I always heard that broken bones required a cast in order to set the bones right while they healed. The nurse tried to stifle a giggle at my question, but I caught it anyway. She said,…” can you imagine a cast about a half inch long?”
I admit that it would look a bit funny. The nurse said that the best she could do was to strap the last three toes together for stability. She told me it would take several months for my nails to grow back and for my broken toe to heal. In other words, I had to suffer with my injury for the entire winter. She dressed my wounds then she gave me four codeine tablets and sent me on my way. The problem was that it was in the middle of December and it was cold and there was a lot of snow on the ground. With my foot bandaged the way it was, there was no way I could get my boot on. I explained this to the nurse who then gave me a plastic bag to keep my foot dry as I hobbled out with my boot tucked underneath my arm. Within moments, my foot was so cold that it started to go numb. I flagged down a taxi and went back to work. I was tough back then. It took a lot to keep me off work.
As soon as I got to work, I took a pain killer. Once I got over the initial pain from my toes, I was surprised to notice that the worst of the pain had settled in my hip and my knee. It is sort of like when you slam your finger in a door. The initial pain is in the finger, but after a while the finger still feels a bit sore, but the bulk of the pain is in the elbow.
I bought a pair of sneakers that were over-sized and still had to cut an opening on the side for my tender toes to hang out. At least I was able to walk a bit better. Over the course of that winter, I had two people run over my toes with their shopping carts, once in a grocery store and once in a department store. Both times I was reduced to tears and a string of muttered obscenities. I had it kicked by strangers, and stepped on by a large dog. My sneaker was red and I swear it acted like a beacon to all who came in contact with me in the course of a day.
Eventually it all healed and the nails grew back. Now I wear closed slippers and I never rush for anything. I simply try my best. If I am late for something, I found out that the world does not come to a grinding halt. Wisdom comes with age.