older and wiser?

Well, let me see.


There was the time I tore a ligament in my foot doing Jane Fonda aerobics and refused to not finish the class. I ended up on crutches for weeks, and I swear I can sometimes feel that very same ligament twinge. That one I can chalk up to being young and stupid.


Then there was the time I tried to slice my thumb off while cutting up food for my then pet parrot. Several hours of microsurgery and hundreds of stitches later, my "reward" is a scar on my left hand that is quite the attention grabber. I can blame that one on handling carbon steel knives without enough caffeine running through my system. And being young and stupid.


I once waded through a flooded house and grabbed at the handle of a still plugged in fridge. Bad idea. (Young and really stupid). At my dad's house, I turned the gas up too high on the gas grill and ended up burning off my left eyebrow and all of my eyelashes when it ignited on me. (Young, stupid and funny looking). This was the same grill, now that I think about it, where I once absent-mindedly flipped a steak over onto my other hand and gave myself second degree burns. This happened the day before I was going home to California, so I spent the entire plane flight with my hand stuck in a big cup of ice water. (Young, stupid and clumsy).


There was the great Entertainment Center Throwdown of 2007, which left me with a scar on my shinbone from knee to ankle. And the time I got dragged half a block by a German Shepard on a cat finding expedition, taking all the skin off both knees. And the time the above mentioned parrot tried to stop himself from falling off of my shoulder by grabbing onto my nose with his beak. That wasn't pretty. Who knew a nose could make a noise like that? I could go on, but I think I've made my point. You could sell tickets to a guided tour of the scars on my body.


But I'm making a lot of changes in my life, and not repeating past mistakes, so I thought I'd try something new this time. This time I figured I'd hurt myself and not leave a permanent mark. I wanted to lay the Young and Stupid mantle to rest and start working on Older and Wiser. This may be a very long process.


Today - two weeks and four days after Dee Dee the wonder dog knocked me down the stairs, eight twelve hour shifts under the bridge, many Christmas shopping trips finished, three quarters of a bottle of Lortabs and countless Ibuprofens later - I finally went to the doctor. It took a co-worker picking up the phone and dialing the number for me (and then standing there while I actually made the appointment). If stupidity was a sport, I'd be a gold medallist.


My ankle is fractured. Distal fibula, to be exact. It's not a huge break - both the ER doc and the radiologist missed it, probably because of the swelling. But it's damn clear now. The good news is that it's a break that can heal even when bearing weight, as long as it's supported by my lovely ankle boot. The bad news is that the ortho doc sat across from me with a work release form and said "Tell me what you want and I'll write it. Do you want off work for the next six weeks? Do you want to work half-shifts? Quarter? Name it and it's yours."


And I said, "Oh, it's okay. I'll be all right working."


Old and stupid? You be the judge.