Dodging a bullet!

WARNING!  If you’re the type of person who gets queasy looking at injured body parts, you should seriously consider not continuing and, instead, wait for the next blog post.  Really, you should.  Now, if you’re the kind of person who is likely to say, “Heck, that’s nothing, I was hoping to see a compound fracture with the bone sticking out of the skin!” then you might as well read on.  You’ve been warned.

If you’ve read the Grand Fall Adventure post, you know I sprained my ankle last Sunday.  I wasn’t going to blog about it except, given the fascinating way my body has responded to what happened, it seemed like something worth sharing.  And I think my body can show, way better than any words I can use, just how close I came to ending our Grand Fall Adventure before it even started.

What happened was I stepped down from the driver’s compartment in Beast, and as I let go of the upper hand-grip to drop to the ground my foot slipped off the edge of the driveway onto the ground below (no, it’s not even like it should be - call me a terrible homeowner) as my whole weight was dropping down on my extended foot.  And I turned my ankle.  Bad.  

Now, I’m rather experienced with sprained ankles - twisted ankles, real sprained ankles, and even a broken ankle (though I didn’t know it at the time - and in any event, I had to tape it up and hike a couple miles out of Red Rock Canyon [I know, you ask “Who goes hiking with ankle tape?”  Well, I do because . . . I’m all to familiar with this sort of thing, like I said]).  So when I get that all-too-familiar but never welcome shooting of pain running up my ankle and knee, my instinctive reaction has become to try and totally let go of any pressure to that leg and hope I don’t wind up on my face.  Often, I minimize the damage to the twist and manage to bring my walking leg forward sufficiently enough to not fall down.

Well the pain that shot up my leg this time was massive, as was my response to it.  I tried my best to revert to my aikido training (problem was, I wasn’t moving in a lateral direction so I couldn’t roll), and then my best soccer player “flop” (have you noticed that they always try to land on as much body surface as possible - flinging your arms off to the sides actually has a purpose, though half the time it is a dive).  But in the end I just came down on my hip, butt and then torso.  And I came down hard.  Graceful it was not.  It probably registered on the seismograph at the UO campus.  I’m also sure that some Russian listening post heard the invectives that streamed from my mouth afterwards.  (After another similar incident when playing soccer with Len and his guys [and yes, I had to explain to them that they were not allowed to use the words I’d just yelled], Brandon stood over me and said, “Boy, I bet that hurt!”  Kit - you were almost no longer a twin that afternoon.)

So three days later, here is what the inside of my ankle looked like.

That actually was the part least injured (though it didn’t seem like it at the time!).

And now the outside of the ankle:

No the photograph is not distorted; yes the ankle and foot are swollen and bruised.  Feeling the injury, it goes up to about 5 inches above the ankle.  That splotch immediately above the ankle bone is where I think the worst damage is.

What you can tell from these images is that I tore stuff in there and, after a couple of days, the blood has made its way out to unveil to the world that indeed, I was not kidding when I said it hurt.  Kinda like when I tore a calf muscle playing soccer in Liberia.  Another thing I would love to never do again.

But like I said, I’ve been here before, and the ice and elevation (now heat and ice, and elevation), as well as a healthy dose of anti-inflammatories are doing their thing.  No, I didn’t go to the emergency room because I could wiggle my toes and ankle and had no sharp pain - they would have asked me what I’d done to it, done to take care of it, and then tell me to keep doing it (just like the last two times this has happened and I’ve gone in to get it looked at).

Now, you can tell I’m getting old because I’m losing all sense of modesty and I’m about to show you the other injury.  It took two full days for the leg injury to show up and over three days for the butt injury to reveal itself (I felt really bad saying my butt hurt as much as my ankle because you couldn’t tell by looking at it).  But (pun intended) when the bruising showed, did it ever scream ouch”. 

Now that is nothing but good honest bruising.  Nothing is torn because I can move my leg just fine (well, it feels kind of like the second day after you’ve worked out too much, but no sharp pains at all).  I’d like to be able to say, “Well, you think this looks bad, you should see the other guy!”  Except for the other guy was the ground and it looks just fine.  I might have misplaced a rock or two, but it’s the ground, so it doesn’t matter.

What the hip bruises make me realize is how much energy I had going downward on my ankle when I managed to twist my body off the vertical line of my foot.  If I’d decided to try and stop myself with the twisted ankle, I’m sure it would have snapped.  And since it’s my driving foot, that would have meant the end of our vacation.  In other words, I dodged a bullet.  Make that a .50 cal sniper’s round.

But to add a little levity to the story, in my darkroom days I would buy products from a company called Gravity Works.  They made film and print washers that utilized gravity to help achieve an archival wash.  Well, it may sound obvious, but sometimes the oddest things can remind you that . . . gravity works.

Here’s a photograph of my toes:

No, I did not injure my toes.  They are just fine.  Except gravity works and that’s where the blood just happens to be pooling (that and the ball of my foot).  Kinda looks like a tattoo of the painted hills . . . nah!  So I’ll have to put up with swollen feet for a few days, and then my body will get rid of all of it and they’ll return to a normal color and size.  It’s interesting though.  

And in case you were wondering, the sacrificing of my body did more than keep me from having a broken ankle.  It greatly minimized the injury, though the photos wouldn’t suggest it.  I can already place pressure on the balls of my feet.  Something that has, on at least a couple of occasions, taken two weeks to do after an ankle injury.  In fact, I can even stand up on the ball of my right foot (something that has taken a month or more before I could manage it), which means I did an amazing job of minimizing the damage to the ankle and preserving some hope of going on a real hike or two on our trip.  But that’s only if I’m careful between now and then and do my flexibility exercises.  Perhaps I should trace the Cyrillic Alphabet with my toes?

All I can say is, “Thank you butt!”

Post Script - It's a couple of days after I wrote the post and my body is still changing.  While the bruising on the ankle has started to fade a bit, the bruising on my hip/butt finally started to look like a single point of impact.  So I figured I'd throw in another image and, yes, Brandon you can go ahead and say it.

Yes, it did.