“Let’s kick some ice!”

27Jun07

See this?

These aren’t my toes, as you might have guessed from the daintiness and the nail polish. These belong to Candace, who will surely be surprised to see them here instead of on her own blog or, for that matter, at the end of her own foot. The blackened big toenail is a souvenir of her recent 10K race. But I’m stealing this photo for illustrative purposes because it matches my own big toe so well.

Fencing-related bruises usually tend to be collected on the upper arm or chest, but I got this one from literally going toe-to-toe with a tough opponent. We collided, and I stubbed my toe on his foot. I hopped around in pain for a moment, finished the match, had some ice water and rested my foot, then finished out the night and rollerbladed home. When I peeled off my sock, the nail was black. Later, I stubbed it again on a couple of spindles of disks sitting underneath my computer desk and shrieked.

Just a little while ago, I opened up the freezer door to get a bottle of ice. I keep about three 500 mL bottles of ice in there and cycle through them throughout the day as a means of supplying myself with a constant flow of ice water and beating the ungodly heat, which reached a high of 35 degrees Celsius in my house yesterday. It turns out, however, that three bottles is one too many to fit into the door of my freezer, because as I opened it, one bottle dropped out.

And this brick of ice landed directly and squarely on my already-bruised toe.

I was instantly in a universe of pain. It didn’t quite make the list of the worst things that have happened to me (the top three being the time I jumped into the icy waters of Lake Ontario in April, my fourth-year philosophy of feminism class, and the first time I listened to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, in that order), but it certainly felt like a contender for a few terrible minutes.

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