Filet of Foot: Slice me, dice me, sew me up nicely.

I am 27 and some few months. My feet, however, are aging in dog years. I realized this after I broke two feet in one year doing things a somewhat healthy, fairly mentally-equipped person ought to be able to do: walking and jumping. I’ll level with you – the first broken foot may have been a product of J. Simp. stilettos, Pat Benatar excitement, and an overabundance of Mud Island draft beer rather than early-onset osteoporosis.

The second, however, was a full on freak-streak of good ole bad luck. I did a flip off the dock into the (30-foot deep) water and wish-boned the hell out of my 5th metatarsal (that’s the pinkie-toe bone for those of you who haven’t spent the past 3 days signing medical mumbojumbo in order to get them to cut you open and screw you back together). In any case, this latest mishap landed me not only in a cast but also in the operating room, and the oxycodone is telling me that if I had to live through it, you should have to hear about it, so here goes.

Let me just say this journey began with delusion; I swore up-and-down that no one was going to put a cast on my foot. I charged up my taser and fully planned to make a run for it if the doctor tried to put me in another plaster hellboot. As it turns out, though, running is quite impossible, and I would prefer a cast to the current route in which they literally had to screw together two pieces of bone in my foot. So, you know, ouch and stuff.

Anywho, when I arrived at the surgery center, Shirley (a bescrubbed, bespectacled woman who looks like she’s been working the front desk since they invented penicillin) told me that gum-chewing would result in surgery cancellation and made me swear on the Bible that I had not engaged in such. Once I convinced her I was clean, she helped me sign the majority of my rights away, and then I was called into “the back” by an uberchirpy orderly named Pam.

May I just say, I feel like anytime you’re ordered to deal with “the back” of anything, you’re on the losing end of that situation – the back of the line, the back of the bus, the back of my hand, etc. I’m just sayin, can’t we fancy that up? Call it something ridiculously euphemistic like “the surgical spa” or “the repair suite”? Take that into consideration, Baptist. Preesh.

So at that point, I had a serious Come-to-Jesus with the anesthesia guy, who they were calling “Doctor Bono” (I think at his request judging by his tinted queerdo glasses) but who looked more like Apu from The Simpsons in scrubs. As I was trying to convince him to go ahead and dose me up with an elephant tranq, I overheard one of my curtained-off roommates say “So you wan me to take dis here toof out before we do dis? I ain’t got ‘em to glue it in derr real permanent yet.” Thankfully this reminded me to remove all my gold “teef”, so the community prep room was totally worth it.

Well, as Bono would never tell a lie, I was knocked flat out for the next 60 minutes. When I came to, it was all over, and I promptly began requesting the football-player-sized meds I had been promised. As it turns out, 2 big pulls of Delotid are all the hospital is legally allowed to administer, so I sobbed quietly until some random Turbonurse unceremoniously “helped me get dressed” by jamming my legs through my shorts and then turning me out into a wheelchair that I’m pretty sure she already had rolling at 10 mph toward the door.

And that’s how I came to be in my current hobblestate. Paul and Dot chauffeured me home, let me order one of everything from some chain Italian restaurant in G’town, and listened to me ramble through my pilly haze about how this is “THE BEST PIZZA I HAVE EVER EATEN. No seriously. Like they use TWO kinds of cheese on this pizza. How did they even THINK of that? We should write in to the Food Network and tell them about this.” And then Dot took my happy bottle away.

I have since recovered my little magic beans and am considering testing out my (nonexistent) left-footed driving skills in order to attend a hopefully one-time-only HandiCapable Sleepover with a few other Unfortunates. So keep your fingers crossed that my left foot works better than my left eye, or this could be the first and last you hear from Ripley Pickles. Happy Labor Day, everyone! Now go forth and limp large. I plan to.

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