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Tuesday, August 15th, 2006
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9:57p
OK, now that I have slept through the majority of the really, really bad pain upon my toe waking up and figuring out part of it is missing:
Last night, in the midst of the fabulous wake put on in my honor by ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif) snapple, I dropped my drum on my big toe. Had this been any other drum, my toe would merely be very hurty. No, this is the new drum, a tama or "talking drum." I bought this one because it is quite a bit bigger and heavier than most other tamas. It weighs about 25 pounds, carved from a solid log of birch, and absolutely gorgeous. I have named it Kata Kata (which means, in Nigerian Pidgin, commotion/shit/chaos/hell breaking loose) because that's what I sound like playing it. However, the drum, taking offense, broke free of its strap at one end and came crashing down directly onto the base of my big toenail.
It didn't hurt for a half-hour after that, and then by noon today the pain got so bad I decided to see a podiatrist. And, hey, I had to be convinced to go to the hospital when I broke my foot because it didn't hurt, so this must be bad news. I went with the first guy in the provider directory to have an appointment available today, but I figured he was all right when the first time I heard his voice, he was cussing out Blue Cross on behalf of a patient. "Heartless bastards, we'll just ship him right back to the nursing home and his foot will just ROT OFF and then you'll be happy, right?" And since they're the ones that tried to refuse the claim on my foot way back when ("not an injury to life or limb"), I hate Blue Cross anyhow. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, at least in the health care industry. Five minutes later, his patient had his procedure approved - and, presumably, what they can save of his foot. And it turns out they know my old, unfortunately retired GP; the nurse used to be his patient, in fact. I lucked out BIG TIME on these people.
The medical care itself was as good as I was hoping. The guy's specialty is surgery ("podiatric"? Don't know, too lazy). Which was a good thing, as it turns out. We won't know until tomorrow's x-rays if the toe is a simple break or if the fucking thing is shattered. It's still too swollen to get a read on how bad it is in there, and the needle for the local anesthetic kept hitting... something where it shouldn't, so I may have in fact done a very bad thing to my big toe. (If it's shattered and they have to amputate it, I'm gonna ask to take it home and set it into a pendant and make it wear hats on special occasions and everybody will have to speak to Toe before they're allowed to speak with me.) But right then and there apparently I needed to have my toe operated on and the nail surgically removed, which took him about fifteen minutes and would have been shorter had I not apparently been resistant to novocaine ("Should I be feeling that?" "Nooooo...") and then they had to bring out some heavier anesthetic.
Yeah. So just before GREs I'm gonna be at Porter, AGAIN, getting x-rayed, AGAIN, but at least it's not the same ol' same ol'. I really do appreciate the variety and having a different reason to go to a hospital and for something that's not going to kill me. And it isn't a proper wake unless someone's drunk and someone's injured; I was too distracted by warm fuzzies to get drunk so others took up the slack, and so the second responsibility apparently fell to me.
Also, canes are trendy now. Though if anyone's planning to get me a pimp cane, keep in mind it ain't nothing without the big fuzzy hat.
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