it's a hard knock life

I’ve blogged about this before but I always get injured doing stupid and/or embarrassing things. I’m never doing anything cool when I get hurt. For once I’d just like to have a good story to share when someone walks up and asks, “Hey…what happened to you?”

You might remember stories of past injuries. For example, my “sports injury” that resulted in a dislocated knee cap. Or the time I broke two of my toes when simply trying to walk to the bathroom shower. Or perhaps you heard about the time I was bitten by a poisonous spider in my sleep and I thought my arm was going to fall off. Oh…and I could never forget about the time that I slipped and fell in the rain and couldn’t get back up.

So to add to my ever-growing list, I have a new injury to tell you about. Tuesday night my roommate and I were working on getting our office set up at the house. I put together my new desk from IKEA (incidentally, I went to IKEA this past weekend and it turned out to be a very eventful and slightly dramatic trip. But I’ll save that for another blog post). After rearranging some furniture we decided to hang up some pictures. Earlier in the evening I noticed that one of the office chairs had a bent leg and I warned my roommate to be careful while using it. I did not heed my own warning, however, when I grabbed that same chair to stand on while I hung a picture. Suddenly I felt the leg of the chair buckle and I fell over backwards to the floor. I wish there was a video camera to capture my fall as I’m sure it was quite amusing. I don’t remember exactly how I landed but I ended up spraining both my elbow and wrist, bruising my leg badly and hitting my head on something leaving a huge knot.

Despite the fact that I could not move my arm without feeling excruciating pain AND having my fingers go numb and turn blue, I opted to take some ibuprofen, go to bed and see how it felt in the morning, Of course I was still in pain when I woke up. I also discovered that my morning routine was somewhat challenging and took a lot longer with only one arm. When I finally got in to see the doctor at 3pm the next day I was sent to the lab. I cried in the x-ray room because they made me move my arm and rotate my wrist a lot. They apparently didn’t appreciate the amount of pain I was in. Luckily, nothing was broken. The doctor gave me some pain meds and a very fashionable arm sling to wear for the next few days. Oh…and I traded cars with a friend of mine because my one-armed attempt at driving a stick shift didn’t turn out too well.

And these are the days of my life…