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?