A Month in the Life: April 1, 2010 -- April Fools Day

I've always though it was bizarre that April would being with April Fools Day. It's kind of like April is giving you the finger while sticking out its tongue at you.

And, as is usual, I got the biggest bird.

Let me explain.

Two years ago, on April Fools Day, I took a header down the stairs of our house.  I think there might even be a blog entry about it.  My ankle rolled on me--which is a side effect of the serious back injury I had resulting in weaker ankle muscles and neurololgical response. It wasn't a pleasant experience; I lay on the floor for eight hours waiting for someone to get home and help me.  Ended up in the ER for a long night of xrays, tests and dehydration IVs.  Needless to say, that header accelerated the degenerative disc disease that's had its way with me since the car wreck eight years ago.

So today, I walked across the street to the convenience store.  And while I was coming home and talking to my older daughter on the phone, my ankle rolled on me. Sunny day, dry, level concrete, in new tennis shoes--and my ankle rolled. I hit the concrete hard, cell phone flying.  For a minute, all I could do was cuss and rock back and forth.  But when the jackass in the seventies' Nova almost ran me over, I figured it would probably be a good idea to get up and hobble home. I picked up my cell phone (the daughter was still talking non-stop, unaware that I'd almost lost my life) and realized almost instantly that not only could I not put weight on my ankle, but that when I'd hit I'd blown out the knee on the opposite leg. 

And somehow I had to cross four lanes...six with the turning lanes--of busy traffic without using my legs or my feet.  Great.

I managed to make it across (barely), got up the steps and into the house, where I promptly collapsed on the couch and reached for my emergency pain meds.  Within an hour, both ankle and knee were swollen and turning ugly--but what was even worse was that I could now no longer manage to either stand or sit up straight.  I was pretty much done, immobilized on the couch without any way of getting anything I needed.  Shannon (the husband) came home early to help me out.  After arguing for a couple of hours whether we should go to the ER or the doctor, we finally agreed on the doctor in the morning if I was worse or, at the very least, not improved.

Since I was going nowhere, the schedule went out the window for the day.  I stayed on the couch, switching out ice packs and working off and on on Defying the Covenants, the solo conclusion to the Vampire Covenants trilogy.  Between 4:29 and 8:00, I got 6k written on it, answered emails and headed off problems online, edited some blurbs and excerpts and sent them back to the writers and started my organizational list for the RT convention later this month. After watching Survivor & Project Runway, my normal Thursday night TV routine, I worked for a couple of hours on Terella, reading through what I've written so far and doing a sketchy mini-edit for typos, misspelled words and almost every instance of 'that,' 'suddenly,' and dialogue tags in the WIP.  Not a very productive day--albeit a lot of fun.  I helped the moderators with their annual AW April Fool's joke and was somewhat more credible than normal owing to the screaming pain and the effect of extra narcotic assistance.

Not quite a total loss.