Accident Prone? No Way

Someone I once considered a dear friend said I was accident prone. I was miffed. I was indignant. My knickers went into an immediate twist.

Me? I may not be the soul of grace, but accident prone? I don’t think so. I made a quick goodbye and hung up the phone. It was too early for wine, so I decided a cup of coffee would help me think this through with a clear head. I hobbled into the kitchen and fired up the Keurig. I had somehow managed to catch my big toe nail on the bottom of a cardboard box a couple of days earlier, initiating a toenail removal that was completed the next day by an urgent care doctor. This incident is what elicited the accident prone comment.

I mean anyone can have an accident once in a while, but accident prone? Adding cream to my coffee, I thought back to my last visit to urgent care.

It was at least three months earlier. I was trying to pull a gigantic and tenacious weed out of the raised planter box in order to plant tomatoes. The large, deep roots wouldn’t budge, so I leaned over the edge of the box for leverage and felt the resulting pop and give. Not the weed, my ribs. I tossed aside the trowel and went inside immediately to lie down. Getting back up, or turning over, or, for that matter, moving at all caused pain in the offended rib cage. I asked Brad, my son who is unfortunately (for him) close enough to be called on in emergencies, to come and exact revenge on the weed. Then I went to urgent care. Not broken, they said, deep bruise and maybe a separation.

So two accidents in three months. That’s not so bad. As I sipped the hot, caramel-colored liquid, I remembered an incident when I was rushing to extinguish a fire in the oven and stepped into the dog’s food bowl, skated across the kitchen floor, landed on my left shin and knee, then somehow bounced and ended up on my back with my head reeling and my leg throbbing.

A couple of years before that, I went to take the dog out in a driving rain around midnight wearing flipflops and slid down the back steps. Well, one leg slid down, one stayed behind with the dog. The X-ray the next morning at the ER showed a break just above the ankle. It would require surgery and, as it turned out, about three months of a cast then boot and limited activity. A year or so before that, an ungrateful horse threw me out of the arena, through the top rail of a board fence and into the paddock across the aisle from the arena. I guess I flew a little bit. The resulting broken wrist had to wait for a cast until the swelling went down.  The morning I was to see the orthopedic for the cast, I caught my second toe in a deflated air mattress and, yep, broke it.

The so-called friend had mentioned that she had ridden horses since she was in onesies almost and had never had an accident. I never should have told her about the Arabian that bucked me off on the rails-to-trails equestrian trail. Or the Tennessee Walking horse that bucked me off in the practice arena. Both of those incidents resulted only in a hematoma or two, but I guess they still qualify as accidents.

Then there was the time the skittish rescue horse knocked me down and stepped on my arm, convincing both me and the ER physician the arm was broken, until an X-ray showed it wasn’t. Contusions and bone bruise. A few years before that my right foot was forever prevented from wearing high heels when a runaway mare slipped in the mud and went down with me under her, breaking the stirrup and doing some undiagnosed thing to the joint under the big toe and causing an immediate bunion-like protrusion. The hoof-shaped bluish discoloration at the base of the other toes was from a very large horse planting his foot on mine a few months before that.

Then there was the car accident that left me with a chipped pelvis and a temperamental SI joint that still doesn’t like certain movements, a bike accident or two . . .  .

Hmmmmm.  Maybe I am accident prone.  And now I am depressed on top of that.  I think I will get that wine after all — and make a phone call to a very dear friend of mine.