When Ugliness Collides with Ugliness

BOOM!

Did you hear that? It was me falling on my front lawn two afternoons ago. I fell hard, and I'm not a slight woman. Story goes something like this...

An enormous tree collapsed on my front lawn. It looks as if an alien ray was shot down from above and the whole tree splayed outwards. Sort of like a a giant thumb squashed it down from above. Bizarro to see. So, I'm walking up there with my eight year old son to see the crazy site, checking it out, oooohing and aaahhhing and calculating how much it is going to cost my husband and I to have the sucker removed. I'm walking back towards my house when my left foot enters some sort of concealed animal hole.

And down I go. My right leg twists at a disturbing/non-human angle and I land in a heap. Instant, white-hot pain rips through my left ankle and right knee. I scream and I scream loud. My son is instructed through the tears and panting to go get his older brother. He dashes off. I immediately try to get my bearings. I know there is no way I will make it back up to my house - it is about 1,500 feet away from where I am. I decide to start crawling across my front lawn. Yeah, crawling.

Down come the two sons, running like their lives depended on it and I lean hard on my 127 pound, 5 foot 3 inch, twelve year old son (he's a big guy - thank god) and I somehow make it up the twenty front steps to my house. I seriously do not know how I made it up there.

I will equal the pain with labor; it was that intense and unforgiving. My husband works an hour away. My mother couldn't leave work. I had to call an ambulance.

Picture this.

Two male paramedics (they really looked like they were small/skinny high school juniors) and one small female paramedic have to get ALL of me back down those twenty steps and onto the awaiting stretcher. I closed my eyes and said about ten Hail Mary's on the journey back down. I made it onto the stretcher and off we went to the hospital; it was the first time all three of us were ever in an ambulance. One kid in the front seat and one kid in the back with me - what an adventure - what a memory.

After a six hour stint in the ER I made it back home. No brakes. One severely sprained left ankle. One sprained right ankle. One sprained right knee.



And a walker.
Yep, you read right, a walker. Check it out.





BOOM!