The "TOE" - The first night

Okay, so I'm finally getting around to telling about my toe injury. This all happened on March 16th, the day before St. Patrick's Day. Doyle and I had gone to the gym to work out as usual and within the first 15 minutes of being there... I hurt myself. That was about 6:15pm. If you've already heard the story from this night, you might want to skip this and wait for me to publish the update. :)

I was getting the squat machine set up with weights when this guy comes over and starts putting weight on the very machine I've already marked as my own. I said "excuse me?" to him and he looked at me startled like he hadn't seen me standing only 6 inches from him. He says "oh, are you using this machine"? I tell him yes and he goes on to tell me that he only needed one of the weights on the rack but it was behind some of the other weights that he didn't need. And that's why he moved those weights on the bar that I was using so that he could get to the one behind them. I said oh, okay. He then took the one weight he needed and took the ones off the bar. I then put the weight I was holding on the bar. Then I walked over to the other side of the machine to put a weight on it.

That's when I apparently decided to replay the strange occurrence in my head instead of paying attention to what I was doing. When I saw the weight that I needed was behind some other weights as well, I knew I had to remove what I thought was only 2 weights to get to the one behind them. Only when I grabbed the two weights and pulled them forward (about chest high), I instantly realized that there evidently were 3 weights that I had pulled forward. I had my hands on the 2nd and 3rd weights but the first weight just dropped straight down and onto my foot!

The gym was fairly packed that night and the two guys there were beside me, started laughing after it fell. Now, I really have no idea if they were laughing at me but I thought they were. So I just acted like nothing had happened, even though my eyes were about to bulge out of their sockets because the pain was unbearable. I simply reached down, picked the weight up and put it on another rack. I then grabbed the weight that I did need and put it on the bar. I honestly thought that the pain would subside and I would just go on lifting. But after I took a few steps to get behind the bar, I knew there was something terribly wrong with that foot.

So I walked over to Doyle who was about 10 feet from me, and matter of factly, told him I had dropped a weight on my foot and that I needed to use the restroom. I did have to limp slightly to get there but kept a very straight face and still tried to act like nothing had happened. Once I sat down in there and took my shoe off, I saw the red blood had already soaked through the sock and I really thought I was going to get sick. I immediately put the shoe back on, which was more painful than taking it off, and went to tell Doyle we needed to leave immediately.

As soon as I walked outside I totally lost it. I think I just wasn't going to allow myself to cry in front of anyone at the gym. Once we started down the road, Doyle said he would take me to Solantic, which is a walk-in clinic. Just before we got there, I took the sock off my foot. I really thought I was going to puke. And poor Doyle, he had to listen to me wail about the pain and the fact that I was pretty sure I was going to end up in more pain once someone started working on that toe.

So we get to Solantic and the girl touches it and says they can't help me there, that I need to go to the emergency room. She tells Doyle where the closest one is and we head off. Once we get there, we wait for 2 1/2 hours before anyone sees me. To try and make an even longer story shorter, I ended up: (1) getting a pain killer shot on each side of my big toe. The pain from that shot was horrific. Don't ever get shots in your foot unless you absolutely have to! The shots made my toe get huge before it soaked into it completely. I've never seen this before. (2) They took x-rays to see if it was broken and it wasn't. (3) The doctor ended up pushing the toe nail to make sure the blood was able to come out from under the nail. This was probably the most excrutiating pain I had felt that night. I literally was yelling while digging my fingernails into Doyle's hands. (4) I almost passed out when the doctor started telling me that most cases they end up having to drill a hole in the nail bed to let the blood out. I got so lightheaded at hearing this, that they had me lie down on the bed and hooked me up to a machine to track my vitals. I felt really dumb at this point in the night... and my most thoughtful husband used my cell phone to capture it... (5) One of the nurses cleaned the toe and gave me crutches and shoe bootie. (6) We finally got checked out and did the paperwork.

We filled my pain killer prescription, hydrocodone and went to Arby's to finally eat supper. We got home around midnight. The pills took the edge off of the throbbing but never did really take all the pain away. I was kind of surprised because I thought that was supposed to be the "good stuff". I'll post a seperate blog for the update on what has happened since this first night.