avocado8

Black and Blue (and Purple and Green)

So as the caption on this photo explains, the ankle was painful enough on Saturday morning that I returned to crutches for the weekend. I think this was a good choice in any case, because we went down to visit my in-laws, and it's hard to imagine getting around their giant house—not to mention the stores, driveways, sidewalks, restaurants, and parking lots I had to navigate—with a bandaged-and-besocked foot sans crutches.

Once I got back in my own house on Sunday night, of course, I abandoned the crutches again and returned to hobbling. It's too much of a pain in the arse to drag the crutches up and down the stairs, and 90 degree angles aren't hard to manage. It's the 45s that are the big problem—something I already knew, but which was driven home for me when we went around our first sharp curve at speed in the car on Saturday. I had propped my foot up on a pillow in the passenger-side footwell, and either centrifugal force or gravity or some other physics-related force ended up tilting my foot to the left as we went around the curve. I actually squealed in pain, and it took the better part of the trip for me to figure out how to brace my foot appropriately so that it wouldn't tilt again.

I didn't discover the bruising until I took the wrap off at my in-laws' house; judging from the photos of another wounded warrior on Flickr (she sprained *her* ankle a day or two before I did mine), the bruising seems to be a normal turn of events, and not the result of additional injury or a sign of misdiagnosis. (I had actually assumed that it was either a sign that I was healing, or a sign that I'd been walking around too much, causing all the loose blood from the injury to pool at the bottom of my foot. It's probably both.)

Today Al took the Beaner to sharecare, but I'm still hoping that by Wednesday—with a little more rest and a lot of Advil—I'll be able to take him myself, in the car if not on foot. Clutching is mostly about tilting one's foot forward and back rather than side to side, so I'm thinking I will be able to manage. Probably a test drive around the block with Al in the car on Tuesday night would be wise, just in case I stall the car and can't work the clutch well enough to get started again.

Meanwhile, I am totally jonesing for a Starbucks (or Tuscany Cafe) latte. I gorged on them this weekend, when Al was available to drive me around and even run in and fetch drinks for me, but now I'm stuck back in the house. It occurs to me that it might have been a good idea to stop at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods or Wegmans (or even Safeway) on the way home yesterday, as we're still very low on decent eat-from-the-fridge/freezer/pantry-without-having-to-stand-at-the-stove-for-an-hour foods. Is it worth it to hobble the three and a half blocks to Trader Joe's? Would it be crazy to hobble the two blocks to the CarShare pod to rent a(n automatic) Scion xB for an hour to drive to TJ's or WF (OR STARBUCKS)? Is the Universe trying to keep me in my seat by preventing me from logging in to the stupid Philly CarShare website to reserve a car, despite having the correct username and password? Hmmmm.