Well, Shit.

Kirsten broke her foot the other day, taking a tumble down the steps on our side porch. Normally, our safety light above the porch turns on, which helps us see our way up (or down) the steps on the side porch, our primary ingress and egress point for the house.

However, on Wednesday night, this was not the case - and so Kirsten took a spill. Apparently, she rolled her foot forward in the process (she probably had her heel still on the step, moved forward, and stretched the foot downward). There was this pathetic little crumpling sound, and then she said, "OWWWWWWNNNHHHH!!" which is usually my cue to spring into action. I asked her what happened, she told me, and then she said, "Is it normal for your toes to tingle after you do this?"

The answer, dear reader(s) is no, it is not.

So, I bundled my dear wife to the nearest hospital, which as it turns out is St. Alexius on South Broadway, to get her into the emergency room.

As an aside, I've often wondered why it is that urgent care centers, so common in Charleston, where I come from, are both rare in St. Louis, and only open until 7 or 8 PM. What's the point of being an urgent care center if you close so early that people, when they get hurt, have to go to the emergency room? People get hurt more often on the way to or from work or at home than they do at work, so only being open during work hours makes an urgent care center worthless at the times when most people actually get hurt.

End aside.

So we took her to the emergency room, where of course they did not treat us like we were an emergency case. To be fair, we probably were doing better than a person who has a wound like this very gruesome stage makeup (seriously, it's nasty), but there weren't any people like that at St. Alexius. There were the same level of complaint as Kirsten had - "my stomach hurts," "I twisted my knee," "this white stuff keeps leaking out of this hole on my skin." Whatever, you crybabies. My wife is pregnant!

After an hour, they got Kirsten into triage, which is a fancy word for, "You feelin' OK?" Then, we waited another hour for a room in the emergency room, as apparently the four other patients who were there were occupying 10 rooms. Then Kirsten had to go back and sit in a room alone, while I was told to wait outside (I went to Walgreens instead), and then Kirsten finally got X-rayed around 1:00 AM. At 1:45 the ER doctor came and collected Kirsten again and told her she thought it might be broken, and so we got her a splint and were told to see an orthopedist. The one she so kindly recommended was in like Chicago or Mexico City or something.

A note here: If ever you find yourself in the position of "Emergency Room Physician," please learn what a broken bone looks like on an X-Ray.

A secondary note here: If you ever find yourself in the position of "Emergency Room Physician," please learn to recommend your patients to specialists within the same time zone.

The next day (or, more accurately, much later the same day, because we didn't leave St. Alexius until 3:00 AM on Thursday), Kirsten and I returned to pick up her x-rays for her visit with the ortho doctor. We took them home, and, after dinner, took a quick look at them. I'm no anatomist, nor am I an orthopedist, nor am I even a medical technologist, because I was too young to get an Associate's Degree in that subject when Sally Struthers was advertising for them. But despite my educational shortcomings, I could not see a break. I couldn't even see a hint of a break. These were really good x-rays in terms of clarity, and everything looked exactly like my high school anatomy textbooks said it should.

So we contacted Kirsten's General Practitioner, got her an appointment with an orthopedist here in St. Louis, got on the orthopod's schedule very quickly, and were told.....it's not broken.

Ha!

Kirsten managed to sprain a ligament called the ATFL, the anterior talo-fibular ligament (which holds the talus, the largest bone at the top of the foot, to the tibia, the shin bone). No surgery needed, thankfully, but she can't really do much in the way of movement, and she has to wear this awesome heavy-duty walking boot, which, sadly, does not make quite as many Robo-cop noises as I had hoped.

So now Kirsten is crippled, we have an extra pair of crutches (courtesy of the ER orderly who, if nothing else, was fun to be around), and Kirsten has no job, because she can't return to work with her foot all messed up.

How've YOU been?

I've Been Betrayed by the Local Greengrocer

Last night, while Kirsten was working out at 2Schae Cafe, the cafe where she's the nominal manager (and at this point one of only two non-ownership employees), I spent the evening hanging out with her. I do this a lot, since she works evenings three nights a week, and it gives us time to just chill together.

Anyway, she decides that she wants to try to cook a few Ellie Krieger recipes, pulled off of FoodNetwork.com. "Sounds good to me," I say. "Let's go ahead and do that thing you just said we should do." Truth be told, I don't know how much attention I was actually paying.

Anyway, one of the recipes, which we opted to cook tonight, called for escarole.

Wait...what? What the fuck is escarole?

I honestly don't know. But I figure, I've seen the sign at Schnucks in the greenery section before, so they have it there, and chances are good that they'll have it again, right?

Right?

No. No, they won't.

I went to Schnucks to buy the ingredients for tonight's recipe, and they have this thing in a basket labeled "escarole." The label is right there, the basket is right under it, there's not a whole lot of opportunity for error. I don't really know what I'm looking for, so how lucky am I that there's a basket greenery, with a sign right over it, that says "Right here is that thing you're looking for"?

I got home, and Kirsten asks me while I'm putting away groceries, "Did you get the escarole?" I say, "Sure, I did, it's right here. I think." We went to my favorite search engine, and looked up what escarole is supposed to look like.

It looks nothing like this thing I bought.

I still don't know what we actually paid seventy cents for. I threw it away (at Kirsten's behest), but now I'm wondering what else I was lied to about by the food shoppe. Is that can of chipotles really chipotles, or is it really oranges? That ground beef I bought a few days ago, how do I know that's not peanut butter? I mean, I know what the sign said, but how can I ever trust what these labels say again?




By the way, I'm sorry I haven't been updating as much lately.

Adventures in Rachael Ray-ing

Yesterday Kirsten and I agreed to make this awesome-looking (and, awesome-tasting) chicken shepherd's pie out of Rachael Ray's Big Orange Book. It seemed simple enough, and after a trip to the store, we were ready to cookify this thing.

Part of the recipe calls for a portion of store-bought shredded carrots, but I figured that was a total waste of money - better to buy a single carrot and shred it myself, right? I mean, I've got knives, I've got a cutting board, I've got a cheese grater...

And that's where the trouble started. See, I know how to julienne carrots. It's really not that hard, and in retrospect, it would have totally made things much neater. Now that I think about it, so would a Graty. But no, I just had to use that box grater.

About 30 seconds into grating the carrots, my hand slipped, and, wouldn't you know it, I grated the tip right off of my finger.

So I'm bleeding everywhere, but I managed to hold the wound closed, while still getting medical tape and getting Kirsten to open up a Band-aid for me. I cover the hole, I tape the Band-aid down, and I calmly tell Kirsten that I've sliced the tip off of my finger, and I probably won't have the same fingerprints ever again.

So what does she do?

She laughs.

Why?

"Because I knew you'd do something like that."

That's right, readers. I am so predictable to my wife that she even knows what injuries are going to befell me. Now, if only I could figure out a way to get injured by winning lottery numbers...

Berney was WRONG

It needs to be said that, despite the large amount of leather she wore at the time, and despite the protestations by people like Mr. Berney Peng, Carrie-Anne Moss is not attractive, not even in The Matrix.

I am SO glad I got that off my chest.