Broken Toe

I broke my toe this morning. As soon as it happened, I knew.

When I was about seven, I thought it would be fun to jump from half way up the stairs, click my feet together twice, and see if I could land upright. I could, and I did. But then, I figured, Why not three times? My heels clicked the magic number, but I didn’t return to Kansas. Instead, I landed sideways on my toe, and broke the first metatarsal of my right foot.

That feeling must have seared into my neural pathways, because the knowledge of immediate decalcification shot back to me the moment I dropped a 45 pound barbell weight onto my right great toe. I was trying to place it on the leg press sled to start my 30 minutes in the weight room. A couple of other guys were nearby in the leg room, and I kept my cursing sotto voce. I quickly went through possible scenarios, and decided, “Well, shit. I suppose I’m not going to be able to run for a while; I don’t know about biking – probably won’t be able to take that tandem ride with Cheryl this afternoon. But I’m pretty sure I can get through this workout here, now. So long as I don’t push up against the sled with my toe, I ought to be all right.”

My family seems to have a pattern of denial, or maybe just plain ignorance when it comes to dealing with sudden injury. My father Harry was an inveterate do-it-yourselfer. He was always building something with his power tools in the basement, or working on the car to save a few bucks avoiding an oil change. More than once, when I would be “helping” him on one job or another, I’d notice a dripping line of blood coming from his forearm, and point it out to him.

“Oh, I wonder when that happened?” he’d invariably say. He wouldn’t even bother to wipe the blood off, just keep on turning the wrench, or drilling the hole, whatever he’d been doing.

He did grow up in eastern Montana in the 1920s and 30s. Medical care was more of an rumor than an actual option in that place in those days. If you sprained your ankle falling from a horse, you couldn’t just call for a ride on the cell phone; you had to put your foot back in the stirrup and post up and down while the pony trotted home.

This attitude persisted throughout his life. He and my mother build a retirement home on five acres along the Colorado Western Slope. He had the house studded in, but the interior work – electrical, flooring, drywall, appliances – he worked on himself over the next 8 years, until they finally retired and moved in full time.

Back then, keeping in touch involved either an actual written or typed letter, or an expensive long-distance phone call. So weeks or months would go by without an direct communication. I’d come to visit, and find out that he had not thought it necessary to tell me, say, that he had cut off the end of his finger in the huge gasoline snow-blower he needed to clear off the 1/4 mile driveway any time he wanted to go somewhere after a storm.

“It was kind of my own stupid fault,” he tried to explain. “It was one of those wet and heavy snows we get in March, and the snow kept sticking, locking up the blades. I thought I’d put it in idle, but I guess it must have slipped out when I reached in to clear it.”

Apparently, he didn’t want to go to the trouble of turning off the engine, and re-starting.

“So what did you do?” I asked. By then I was a doctor, and would have worried about excess blood loss, but mostly I thought how painful it must have been.

“Well, I took the end of it in to the hospital, to see if they could sew it back on – put it in a cup of snow. But I guess it took so long to get the driveway cleaned off after, that they just laughed at me when I got there.”

So for the last ten years or so of his life, his middle finger was cut off below the nail, about half an inch shorter than the ring finger next to it.

Another time, I showed up at the house, and found him working in the freezing cold under the hood of his Honda Civic.

“Why don’t you close the garage doors?”

“Ida won’t let me, ever since she found me sitting there on the steps, with the engine running, about to pass out.”

“WHAT! You mean you almost died from carbon monoxide poisoning!?”

“Oh, come on, it wasn’t that bad. Sure, I was getting a little sleepy, so I thought I’d just go over and sit down for a while.”

So maybe I inherited a gene which codes for a combination of high pain tolerance, and a resulting lack of proportion when injuries happen. When I broke my foot, 60 years ago, they did try to knock some sense into me. At the doctor’s I thought, “Great, I’ll get a cast, or maybe some crutches at least.” But all he did was wrap my foot, and send me on my way, telling my mother to have me hop around on my left foot for a couple of weeks, until the swelling went down and the bruising went away.

And that’s pretty much what I got told today: “Well, we can wrap it and buddy tape it if you like, mostly for pain control.” But since I’d already smiled and said it no longer hurt, once I took the Alleve and put ice on it, that seemed like overkill. The most the PA could come up with was, “It’ll probably get worse tonight, when it gets more swollen.”

I’ve got to watch out, less for pain, and more for that creeping ignorant drive to self-destruction which comes from not really feeling much pain I inherited from my father. The hardest part of all this will be waiting to start running again. Or skiing. Or chopping wood. And when I go swimming tomorrow, remembering to not push off the wall with my right foot. And keeping a grip on those damned barbells when I go back to the gym on Monday.