My Friend's Great Month

I hadn't talked to my friend lately, so I decided to call her and see how she was doing. Apparently, she's doing fantastic. She planned to get all sorts of stuff done in June, be a super-productive human being. Then... things happened.

It was the summer of '69. She bought her first real six-string at the five-and-dime, played it till her fingers bled... wait, wrong story. Let me start over.

For starters, my friend has some back problems, and hadn't been to a chiropractor in about a million years. (See, I'm not the only master procrastinator.) Anyway, her back was starting to bother her.

One day, her friend asked her if she wanted to go on a walk. It was just a simple little path, he said, nothing major. So she set out with him, and reflected afterwards that from now on, she was going to take his words with a grain of salt. There was nothing easy about it, she told me. Parts of it were steep, and in some areas, the path was so narrow she had to keep one foot in front of the other.

On the plus side, there was a nice waterfall when they reached the end of the long trek. On the downside, they had to walk back. It was a miserable time, going on the treacherous path again. So treacherous, in fact...

To her utter horror, she lost her footing. Seeing as they were going downhill, she found herself falling down the path. Now, the way she described the path, there was a rock wall on one side, and on the other side, it went straight down. She certainly didn't want to fall off and plummet to her death.

So, my friend basically threw herself at the unforgiving stone. Her entire left side slammed against it, and she thought she heard sort of a crunch and a snap. Her ankle hurt terribly, and for those excruciating moments, it seemed best to just lie there in great misery. Finally, she looked at her ankle, which was bent at an odd angle.

This. of course, was followed by panic at the sight of her ankle. She was screaming and crying, her friend was panicking with her. In her head, a calmer part of her said, "Just try to wiggle your toes. If you can do that without too much pain, it's not broken." She really hoped it wasn't broken. Given her present location (the middle of nowhere), it would take a long while for emergency technicians to arrive and get her out of there.

So, after some more wailing and freaking out, she tried to wiggle her toes. It hurt, but it wasn't unbearable. She looked up at her friend. "You're going to have to help me up."

"What? Are you crazy? If it's broken, walking on it could make things worse!"

Finally, she convinced her worried friend to help her stand. She couldn't put her whole weight on the ankle, but she could limp her way around. She made her way awkwardly down the rest of the accursed trail, until finally reaching her friend's truck.

"Home or hospital?" her friend asked.

"Home." she said. After her long day, she just wanted to go home and rest.

Upon reaching her house, my friend promptly lay down in her wonderful, marvelous, blessed bed. By this time, her ankle had swollen to the size of a softball. (There's nothing soft about a softball, by the way. During high school P.E., we called it agonyball.) After lying there a while, she drifted into sleep.

When she woke up the following morning, her ankle was a variety of different hues. Black, blue, purple... She spent much of the following days in bed, trying to rest her poor ankle. As an added bonus, her back was getting worse.

Desperate to have something that would ease the pain, she grabbed a heating pad. She put it on the highest setting, and hoped it would help her back.

Later on, she went to take a shower, and found herself flinching in pain when the water hit her back. Then she realized that setting the heating pad on high and leaving it there had been a bad choice. So now, in addition to her injured ankle and her back going out, she also had a lovely burn. In her attempt to find pain relief, she had created a new source of pain.
My friend had finally made an appointment with the chiropractor. When she came in, hobbling along with a cane, her ankle and back both killing her, the chiropractor took one look at the poor woman and said, "Oh no."

The worst part of this, my friend said, is that everything—the injured ankle, her back going out, burning herself—happened in the space of two weeks. But I guess if you're going to cripple yourself, you don't want to do it halfway. You have to do a thorough job of being incapacitated and in agony. "There are no words to describe the amount of pain I was in."