Falling and Falling in Love With You

14 April, 2013

Today is our 22nd wedding anniversary; that is the good part.  The not-do-good part is that I took a spill.  We were on our way to church, walking.  I had on new shoes, wedgies with medium-high heels; that was my first mistake.  The sidewalks here are broken, rough, uneven.  Really they only suitable for flat, preferably sturdy shoes.  It began to rain, lightly.  So I made the second mistake of, well, looking where I was going.  Around here, you need to look where you ARE, not where you are going.  But eager to get out of the rain shower, I fixed my eyes on the church, half a block away, instead of on the sidewalk below me - and down I went.

I am a very lucky woman; I do not have osteoporosis and did not break a hip!

Two passers by stopped their car and sprang to our assistance, holding out their arms to me.  I just sat there crying like a silly goose.  "Get up," said Demetrios.

"No!  I'm not getting up!"  Some instinct, it seemed, was just telling me not to move.  But a moment later, common sense overruled that feeling.  I couldn't sit there on the sidewalk all day - in the rain, yet!  So I let them pull me up and thanked the women with all my heart.

"I've broken my foot," I told Demetrios.

"Where?"

I pointed to the general vicinity.

"Not likely," he said.  "That is a difficult spot to break."

I elected to continue to church, where I managed to do rather a lot of standing without great discomfort.  But you know how it is with fractures; they worsen over the first couple of hours.

On our way out of the church, suddenly somebody grabbed me, hard, from behind.  "Oh, excuse me, so sorry!" said someone over my shoulder.  A woman had stumbled on one of the stairs and had, as a reflex, grabbed onto me.  It somehow gave me inordinate joy to know she had been spared a worse fall than my own!

We limped slowly home, removed my hose, and had a look.

"Yes, it looks suspiciously like a fracture," said Doctor Theodoridis.  "The knee on the other leg is abraded, too."  It was also beginning to hurt a LOT.  I'm pretty bunged up all over; several places are quote sore.

I burst into tears again as Demetrios cleaned my knee and applied the band-aid - not from pain, but because I suddenly had a flashback; I was back in "Doctor Jones' Bleeding-sore and Band-aid Clinic", as our family bathroom became whenever Dad set up shop there after one of us children had scraped a knee or cut a finger.  (It had to be bleeding for you to qualify at this clinic.)

So off to a hospital in a cab, to add the experience of a Greek hospital to that of an English one; and even I could read the radiologist's diagnosis: a 'katagma, basis 5ou metatarsou.'  (Those ou endings make it the genitive case.)

Today, a splint.  Thursday, a cast, after the swelling has subsided.  Tonight, a good sleep with the help of Ambien, and tomorrow we shall figure out how I shall manage.