My Left Toe

Everyone knows when they've broken a toe —

It gets a good whack, and you know.

The pain is so great

You think you will faint

And all you can say is, "My toe!"

Sorry. I really wanted to talk about snow, but then I hauled off and broke my toe. That seemed to take precedence over the other inconsequential subjects on my mind.

I'm not sure I really broke my toe, and I'm not sure anyone who thinks they did, really did. Unless they see bone or get an x-ray, of course.

But the conventional wisdom (is that an oxymoron?) has always been: you can break a toe easily; there's nothing "they" can do about it but tape it to another toe and let it heal; and it will heal. That's always worked for me when I've broken a toe, except I could never stand the tape, so I skipped that step. It always healed.

The more fascinating thing to me with body damage is the bruising and pain. It is amazing sometimes where body damage shows up through bruising, especially when it felt like a bone being damaged.

I now have a bright-purple pheasant-neck-ring bruise around the top joint of my toe. It's the second toe, which is also strange, because my second toe doesn't even stick out farther than my big toe. (I have cute toes, relatively speaking.)

The paler purplish-blue bruise extends to the middle of my foot. I know, so what? The weirdest thing is...nothing hurts. Unless I bend the toe weirdly, nothing hurts. It about killed me when it happened, but now, the toe doesn't hurt to touch it; the bruises don't hurt; the joint connecting the toe to my foot doesn't hurt.

In fact, this blog entry is probably more painful to you reading it than my toe is to me!