7.8.22
Well, drat! This year is sure turning out to be a challenging one! A rather weird thing happened yesterday evening. After chores were done in the morning, Darrell and I headed off to the shop to try to wrap up installing his new motor in the old 1951 Chevy Coupe, his latest project car. The car had been modified a bit before he bought it and let us just say that it has presented him with a few challenges along the restoration road. What should have been an easy pulling out of the old engine and installing the new one, had us scratching our heads more than once! Needless to say, we persevered and finally got the engine in place and nicely mated up with the automatic transmission. Darrell will jack the car up today, crawl underneath and snug up all the miscellaneous nuts and bolts and the engine will be considered installed!
After coming back to the house, a good hearty potato soup was on order for supper. I got the wood cooker going strongly so as to make a batch of baking powder biscuits – a favourite of ours to go with potato soup as nothing beats biscuits cooked in a wood cooker oven! While the soup bubbled away, I dashed out to turn Heidi and Willow’s calves out with their mums as I decided to forego milking on Sunday morning. A quick check of Lady who is in the farrowing house, soon to give birth, a gathering of the day’s eggs from the henhouse and I was soon back to the warmth of the kitchen and the delicious smell of potato soup on the cooker.
The oven was plenty hot enough, so I whipped up a quick batch of biscuits, popped them in the oven and sat down beside Darrell to watch a bit of telly while the biscuits cooked. Getting up to check on them, my right foot felt a little funny. Sort of if I had sat on it too long and it had become a wee bit stiff. After a couple of steps, it felt fine. The biscuits still had a tad more baking to do so back to my chair I came. After a few more minutes I got up to check on them again and this time, I was hobbling, enough that Darrell noticed my obvious limp. My foot felt slightly painful.
Pulling the nicely baked biscuits from the oven, I doled out our bowls of soup and after slathering on a generous dollop of butter on my hot biscuits, went back to my easy chair to enjoy my soup and a relaxing episode of Doc Martin on the telly. As I ate, the pain in my foot worsened. Finally, I got up and hobbled to the freezer to retrieve a cold gel pack to place on it, propping the foot up in the hopes this would reduce the pain. It did not. What on earth had I done? By the time supper was over, the pain was excruciating, and my foot and ankle had started to swell. This did not feel like a regular sprain and besides, I had not slipped, tripped, twisted or otherwise injured my foot that I knew of. This had come out of the blue! Since it was the same foot that a few years ago I dropped a handyman jack on to, always suspecting I may have broken my foot at that time, I decided we had better head to John Day and have it checked out.
Driving in I was wracking my brains as to what I had done. Yes, I had kicked at the transmission jack under the car a couple of times to realign it but had felt no pain at the time. Could that have been it? I felt a wee bit of a wimp going to the emergency room for a sore and swollen foot but better safe than sorry! By the time we pulled up to the E.R. door, I could not walk and had to be plopped in a wheelchair just to get from the truck to the admitting desk! The attending physician, Dr. Song, took a thorough history and ordered x-rays just in case I had fractured my foot. Johni, the E.R. Technician, good friend, fellow EMT-Intermediate and a past student of mine, was on shift so between chatting to her and the attending nurse Ann, time passed quite quickly.
My foot was duly x-rayed and showed no sign of a break… thank goodness! There was significant tissue swelling which neither myself nor the doctor could explain! After Johni deftly wrapped my swollen foot in an elastic bandage, I was outfitted in a rather awkward splint boot in lieu of the crutches, which I refused – can you see me trundling about the farm on crutches? Johni could not! Instructed to stay off my foot, keep it elevated and iced, Darrell and I headed home.
So here I am, sitting in my easy chair with the offending extremity propped up on pillows. A hot cup of tea, made by Darrell of course, sits by my side. Thankfully, the CPR class I was to teach on Tuesday in Prairie City had been postponed until June and I am sure I will be just fine to teach the class in Monument on Thursday. Darrell is going to make sure I take good care of my foot and take it easy as I heal from this latest bump in the road. I was just cleared by the surgeon who operated on my broken arm to return to service on the ambulance. I guess now I will have to be patient and wait a wee bit longer before turning my pager back on.
Life sure seems to throw a spanner in the works at times. Some days one just asks oneself the age-old question of “Why on earth is this happening to me?” However, there always seems to be a reason, no matter how hard it is to see what it might be at the time. I guess I have no choice but to accept. Those wonderful words from the Serenity Prayer come to mind… “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
This too shall pass….