| My ankle. All that fun purple stuff has now migrated down into my toes. |
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As a boy, I always admired my dad’s ability to sustain an injury without noticing it. When he would help me build my pinewood derby car, for instance, he’d always come up with a few scrapes on his knuckles. I was beyond impressed when he said things like, “Oh, that? Huh, I don’t know where I got that.” “But it’s bleeding!” I thought. “How can you not know?!” Now that I’m all grown up, I shrug off cuts and bruises in much the same way, but for me, the nonchalance doesn’t come easy. I have to work for it. “Oh, this?” I say. “I’ve had worse.” But beneath that millimeter-thin layer of machismo, I’m hurting. Not only that, I’m worrying about the worst-case medical scenario that has probably already taken an irreversible toll on my injury-ravaged body. “He said it was just a jammed finger!” I imagine them wailing at my funeral. “Why did he have to be so brave?” (Who else scrolls past the logical diagnoses and heads straight to the extreme, ‘And in rare cases...’ maladies on WebMD.com? Come on, I know I’m not alone.) The other difference between card-carrying members of the Tacoma Tough Club and faking Faberge eggs like myself is how much effort I put into prominently displaying my injuries. For example, I sprained my ankle while playing basketball the other day. This sucker hurt; I was justified in limping and wincing away from the court. Where I wasn’t justified was in my consideration of neglecting the care of that ankle so that when people saw me hobbling around work the next day I’d have something grotesque to show them. After all, when showing off a bum ankle, “That’s not so bad,” is exactly what you don’t want to hear. “Get this man to a hospital!” is what you want to hear. Take Advil, you say? But what makes you think I want the swelling to go down? Fortunately for my health, I have a wife that’s adamant about R.I.C.E. treatment (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation). Left to my own devices, I probably would have employed H.H.D.J. (Hot tub, Hiking, Dangling, Jumping jacks) to keep the swelling and discoloration at a maximum. I guess these are the lengths to which guys like me have to go to keep up appearances. Kind of like SpongeBob SquarePants, who, when his toughness was questioned, confidently replied: “I’ll have you know, I stubbed my toe last week while watering my spice garden, and I only cried for 20 minutes.” |
