Last fall, I sprained an ankle. It was a mild sprain, from an extended time walking on steep terrain in the rain. I didn’t even notice the injury at the time.
This wasn’t my first ankle rodeo, so I knew what to do. I rested it.
But then I got too impatient and pushed it too hard. I thought I was healed. Whoopsie-doodles! Whatever I did before it was done healing resulted in a far worse injury than the initial sprain.
That wasn’t the true first ankle injury there, though. When I was a kid, I broke that ankle in a tragic swing set accident so badly that I needed surgery.
Just to be difficult, I decided to have a horrifically sensitive nickel allergy, forcing the hospital of my youth to have to special order titanium hardware instead of, say, surgical steel.
“They’re going to put a screw in your ankle,” my parents said, the doctors said. I assumed they were simplifying things for my tiny child brain.
Well, with this latest sprain, because of my surgical history, my primary care wanted to send me for an X-ray first. We needed to rule out that my hardware had become dislodged, or had something wrong with it that was aggravating my ankle, the source of the pain and swelling.
So, merrily I metaphorically skipped my way over to the hospital for my ankle’s glamour shots. And they revealed two things.
Firstly, despite what many conversation partners have told me, I do NOT have a screw loose.
Secondly, they *weren’t* simplifying things for a child back in the day. Instead of complicated brackets and dodads and gidgets, in my ankle there was just a single screw. And not some kind of fancy medical looking screw. No, this is flat out a cartoon screw, like the kind of screw you’d take out of a box to build a deck.
End result: I’m clear for physical therapy to fix up my ankle (phew, no corrective surgery needed); and now I have a funny picture to go with a childhood anecdote. I’m screwed up in the best possible way!
