Last night, my ankle had an out-of-body experience.

It’s a crying shame Shakespeare didn’t write a character who had an almost broken, badly sprained ankle.

He didn’t, did he? 

I mean, I’m only peripherally familiar with the hunchback of Richard III. (I think it’s the III, it’s Richard plus some number, that much I know).

A lateral view of the ankle in question.

I still have two more gruelling performances of this play left and last night I…well…I may have compromised my 1000% commitment to my role in this production:  I now possess a badly sprained ankle.

That’s never happened to me before, in my entire acting career.

Truth be told, and gladly, I used to have really good balance and coordination. I really did. I was always very good at walking. And running. And jogging…though walking was where I truly held master’s credentials. I didn’t really care for the other, unless I was in the middle of a tennis match.  And, of course that would only affect running.  So, I guess, it’s jogging that I didn’t care for much at all.

It doesn’t matter, anyway, not now, not after last night.

I think, “post-the-now-infamous-flip-flops-blog,” Fate decided to rear her ugly, unkempt head and spit on me for stepping on Amanda’s toes the night before, toes that were visible from the starboard side of her flip flops, if you wish to recall that blog. 

Or, to be more exact, let’s say Fate spit on the small walkway in my yard that leads to the front door.

I mean, I slipped on something. And when things happen for no reason, the safest person to blame is Fate. Or, sometimes, Sean Hannity, or Don Imus, you know people like that.

Bless poor Amanda, really. I do love her, she is my best friend, but I just keep hurting her, accidentally. Like I have some deeply embedded vendetta against her. Last night, there she was reaching for her keys to unlock the front door, and I…honestly, I have no idea how it happened…but, I just slipped, I fell on something coming down the walkway.

Let me set the scene a little more, for you:  our walkway to the front door is ever so slightly a downhill curved walkway.  At the end of it, there’s our adorable, quaint front porch with its thick wicker chairs and bistro table set, our random potted army of herbs, the small square box garden, which is still doing very well thank you for asking, and this enormous, large floral arrangment my sister gave me for Christmas, which I am now attached to for no real reason at all and have nailed to the front of the house, over the bistro table set, I like an ambience, if you will – I change out the colors in it to give it more of a seasonal appeal (we’re in lime green right now) and of course the treacherous, oversized brick step that leads you up a small flight of space to the front door.

I was several, several feet behind the unsuspecting Amanda. The lovely Amanda who was wearing a brand new blouse, cleverly patterned in a silk material with soft, red flowers, with that ever so polite and alluring cloth tie that good quality blouses are carrying in style these days. She was a real picture, that Amanda, and to add insult to injury, had her back turned to me, she was trying to unlock the door, and so, as cliche as it was (as most truths are, anyway), she really, truly…never saw it coming.

But then, neither did I.

I wish we could grow this mint. But, Mississippi's soil isn't rich enough.

I was in the middle of a sentence, agreeing with her about about our potential cornering of the market on mint syrups, that’s our new harebrained (circa 1564) idea…although, I will admit, it has some credibility to it.  We do make a mean, delicious mint syrup, and it goes well with anything. Except broccoli. (Don’t ask).

We’d been discussing building more box gardens to put up in the back yard, and I don’t know exactly what happened, but the next thing I knew I was falling. Fast. I was absolutely shocked at the amount of speed my upper body was gaining in momentum as I tripped.

Like a satellite gone terribly awry, I was being propelled at terrific speed, a centrifuge of foolishness, and as bodies in motion must have something towards which they are being drawn, thanks to gravity’s apple, I was deadset on my target: Amanda’s back.

I didn’t have time to warn her.

She didn’t have time to turn around.

The brick step and the concrete porch didn’t care one way or the other.

I slammed into Amanda at whiplash speed. She was thrown, prostrate, to the ground – there went her purse, there went the house keys, and there went my cell phone, there went my keys, there went my glasses. The left leg of my pants were nearly ripped off at the knee, and a gash taking its place, my right wrist, ever ready for a chance at being a reflex, shot out to catch myself from falling head long into the light-iron pillar, one of four twisted metal pole designs that hold our porch awning up, most of the time…and there went “something” from my right ankle.

There was a definite pop.

And I immediately became nauseous. Sweating, clammy. I was going to throw up. I was in severe pain. I look over at Amanda, and she was in shock, her first response was to laugh.  She does that sometimes when her nerves take over.

I do too.  I often laugh in the face of violence.

She stood up, very slowly, asking me why I tackled her. Did I disagree with some point in her argument for putting the mint in the backyard, and if so, couldn’t I have just told her instead of jumping her?

I wasn’t quite able to offer a witty rebuttal. My body was on a completely different wavelength, sending out its worker cells to check all sections of the injured, subcutaneous parties. I was on high alert; I could have heard a dog whistle. I was primed for something…fearing (and hoping against) the inevitable: the emergency room and a broken ankle. I’ve never broken any bone in my body. In kindergarten, once, for show-and-tell, I bragged about two things: never having broken any bones in my body, and never having been bitten by a rattlesnake.

I was terrified that my record was about to be less one bragging right.

I was also filthy. Amanda, you see, fell flat onto the concrete. A scratch or two (actually, the event itself was more damaging than the aftermath. The real irony: she merely re-injured, no lie, the exact same sore I’d caused the night before by stepping on her toe. The very same place. Not another scratch on her.  This is why Fate is in trouble, in my book).

I, however, never made it all the way onto the concrete porch. My right hand, wrist, arm, cell phone and keys did. But the rest of me fell into our lovely flower bed, ringed so preciously with large chunks of flintstone. Those sharp, sweet edges nestled themselves into my right side and took the wind out of me. The very soil I’d watered, fed, and given shelter to smeared their thanks all down my pants and my Zara jacket.

I'm no angel, but this is what it felt like.

My right ankle stayed, turned outwardly at an angle not meant fully for the human foot, in its own little self-made trench, beside the walkway. A picture should have been taken. And further, a scientific note should be made, here, as well. Until last night, I didn’t know there was a subcategory of an out-of-body experience.  I knew there were some people, mainly those who believe in angels a million times over, who had near death experiences.  I suppose that would certainly shock a body out of itself.

But, that’s not what I had. I don’t think. And yet, somehow, I threw my body out of myself…I mean, that’s what it felt like. I didn’t pass out, I saw no light other than the bug light that hangs over the door (well, that and the street light that doesn’t work – I need to call the city about that)…but, I still felt like my right leg and ankle weren’t a part of my right side and arm, which wasn’t a part of the left side of my body at all. It felt like I had to stand up and retrieve my body parts and put them back together.

Which, for all intents and purposes, I did. And then I tested my ankle, which at the time, I was still in enough shock to think all was well. So, I took myself inside and to the bathroom. I had to have a bath, I mean, like right then.

It was there that I saw the size my ankle had taken on: I never knew the human body could swell so much and so quickly. The skin across my ankle is among the tautest (or is it most taut?) on my body. And yet, it appeared that somehow, someone had inserted a cantalope, or half of Dolly Parton, into the space previously occupied by my ankle bone.

I was grotesquely intrigued. But rather than stare all night at it, I did what I remembered you should do when an edema, or swelling, occurs; I also became somewhat tickled at the word “edema” – I may have known a drag queen by that name, once – I put heat on it, first, for several hours. And then, ice.

It almost looks normal-sized now.

Next, comes the real test, though, because I have to go to the bathroom. I’ve not stood on it yet, today. But, now is the hour that something’s going to have to give.

I’m just hoping Fate realizes I gave enough last night.

I’ll let you know, later, if I’m right or wrong.

I was framed in the third, or fourth, grade maybe.

 

Whether I like it or not, I am just not me without these frames.  

 

It is no secret that I cannot see well.  Now, there might be some other mystery about me that is less recognizable or understood (such as why I detest feet so), but sight?  No mystery there.  Starting in third, or fourth, grade, maybe, for some reason unknown to me, my eyes began to betray me, sometimes with less than desirable results.  (I feel betrayed only when I forget to wear my glasses, and you would think for someone who couldn’t see without them, that that would never happen.  But, you would be wrong to assume this, my friend, quite wrong, indeed).  

 

Once when I was eight, I fully brushed my teeth with Cortizone-10.  I could not taste anything for about three and a half days. Still, we consider that more of a developmentally-challenged accident rather than a simple one, like, that I needed glasses.

 

I swear I could hear the ocean.

When I was eleven, I followed behind the wrong woman who coincidentally had the same shade of Firehouse Red hair, as my aunt, (as far as I could tell anyway) down three aisles at Piggly Wiggly.  It wasn’t until we got to the bananas that she asked me why I was following her.  It might be sadder to comment on the fact that my aunt hadn’t, actually, missed me.

 

And still, to this day, I make stupid mistakes. This morning for instance, I styled my hair with shampoo.  Note:  Because my hair has a tendency to grow out into luscious, enviable curls, during the summer months, I often style it with just a tiny dab of conditioner; let’s call it one of my trade secrets.  But it was not so this morning.  I lathered up, already dressed for church, and thought I was losing my mind when foam began to form at my fingertips.  It is never comfortable to rinse your hair when you are already dressed. It’s also never comfortable to only be able to vaguely see that foam appears to be coming out of your fingertips.  Those of you who wear glasses know what a mess it would have been to have then rushed to put on your glasses to try and make sense of such a situation. 

 

Because I’ve worn glasses since the third, or fourth, grade, maybe, I have developed into something of a premature curmudgeon.  (i.e., when I take my glasses off, I can no longer hear as well as when I’m wearing them).  Oh, I’ve tried to incorporate glassitude, as I call it, where I dramatically belabor a point by chewing ever so delicately on the tip of one of the arms of my glasses.  Or legs.  I can’t recall what the appropriate term is, hence my failure at having any glassitude.  Mainly, I just get overheated in a conversation and somehow manage to whack myself in the head during some particular climax and send my glasses flying off into the faces of the unsuspecting.  (Once I actually hit myself in the face so hard, my glasses flew over the bar and into the garbage can, at a favorite restaurant of mine).  That’s how they know me, now.  Oh look, here comes Loose Lee Lenses – put him by the plants.

 

The doctor told me I had Acute Myopia Dysphoria Utopia, or some similar something that sounded dreadfully romantic and, also, at the same time incomprehensible to the human mind.  I had no idea that I personally had the capacity of possessing so dramatic a disease.  And all of it, right there in my two little eyes.  Two eyes that, up until then, had been described as dangerously beautiful, tauntingly alluring. Now, they were basically done with all that, apparently, and were heading into retirement, taking my vision with them. (The little turn-coats). The doctor told me a) my vision would lessen each year by a few degrees [How exciting!] and b) that I was basically borderline legally blind which led me to say, What?  I mean, what does that even mean?  I’ve never understood how one can borderline a disease?  They say that about people like me, or diabetics. 

 

Tell me, please, enlighten me: Is there some Checkpoint Charlie in the internal genetic world of diseases that I’m not aware of?  As if one could stand at a barbed wire fence sectioning off those with diabetes and those without, (maybe it’s stationed at in the duodenum; I’ve never known what its purpose is anyway) and then one could merely glance over said duodenumal fence and consider the alternative – Hmm, I don’t think I’ll put one toe over there in Diabetes Land today…no, I’ll just stand at the border and mock the liver.

 

It’s a bit like faulty hope, like one day, I’m going to be able to wake up and say Enough with the borderline!  Today I reclaim my vision.  A borderline suggests the possibility of running away, in the opposite direction, doesn’t it?  I guarantee there is no borderline in sight for the passengers in my car, should I so choose to drive without my glasses.  They could tell you right quickly where the border ends, and begins.  

 

I just can’t stand not being able to see, though; well, that sounds like sour grapes to those with truer defects, but it’s such a joke to be so dependent on glasses, at my level of sight issues.  Especially when the migraines start, with their hieroglyphics.  Those are the kinds of migraines I get, with the hieroglyphics, and it wouldn’t be so bad if somehow I could temporarily have the ability to read Egyptian when the migraines occurred, but that has never happened, not even once, not even by accident.   

 

I can’t tell you how many walls and doors I’ve run into.  I can’t tell how you many hallucinations I’ve had (these, admittedly, might not be the result of bad vision, but still)…I can’t tell you how much of my personality bad vision has destroyed or, even, determined. 

 

So, I guess you can put me on the wall with the rest of the pictures because ‘what you see is’ well, probably more than I ever will.