Stupid Things I've Done Recently (A Series in 3 Parts)

Continuing stories of my stupidity in Japan. I’ve done enough stupid things lately that I’m going to break this into 3 separate posts.

Stupid thing # 1: Dropped a Bowling Ball on My Foot
I’m not exactly sure how I managed to do this. During our weekly Monday night bowling, I guess I must have had my left foot a little too far forward as I released the bowl. The ball left my hand and smacked right into my ankle.

It only hurt moderately, but it really swelled up fast. Within minutes after the incident, there was a round lump roughly the size of a golf ball on my left ankle. The paranoid side of me was remembering all sorts of stories I knew about people who almost lost limps because of internal bleeding and swelling.

My friends didn’t help any. “What if you dislodged the bone marrow?” someone suggested. “It could get in your blood stream and make its way up to your heart and kill you.”

I scoffed at this possibility and said no one ever died from an ankle injury. But once the idea was put in my head, it started to worry that this might be my last game of bowling. “Maybe I can get a few more strikes in before I pass away,” I said.

Someone got the idea to put ice on it, and it’s amazing what a little ice can do. The swelling went down almost immediately.

So I bought a re-usable ice pack and kept that around my ankle the next day at work. It worked wonders, but then I had to explain to everyone at work that I dropped a bowling ball on my foot.

With this added to the kitten bite, and injuring my hand trying to climb a telephone poll, I’ve had a lot of embarrassing injuries this term that I’ve had to explain at work.

Link of the Day
Via Jana's blog (which comes via Phil and Bork's blog) it appears my hometown has made the news when two people were trampled in the Holiday rush to get into Wal-marts