I recently broke my toe. It was from a silly stubbing on the wall on the way to the bathroom when I was tired and distracted and in the moment it hurt like a bastard. It hurt so much that I felt sick. But you’ll be interested to know that I didn’t cry, scream or swear – instead I laughed my head off. It seems my social condition is getting worse as now the helpless and inappropriate laughter takes over when I injure myself as well as when other people get injured. You would think the pain would steam over the laughter, but evidently not…
Anyhow, as I was lying there on the floor laughing my head off, racked with pain I was thinking two things.
The first was how magnificently hot BB looked bare-chested and holding an icepack to my toe. Yum. The second was ‘Fuck, I have to partake in an evacuation drill of my building next week – how am I going to walk down 100 flights of stairs with a broken toe?’ Cause I already knew it was broken – I heard it go crack – very loudly. And that crack wasn’t coming from the wall – the wall barely felt a thing…
But then I remembered – ha! I now live in America where they don’t make you ‘soldier on’ and do things like partake in arduous fire drills if you have broken a toe. You can get out of it! And when I talked to my boss about it the next day – she confirmed my suspicions – I would be exempt and would even get to leave work early!
So the lesson is, if you have to break a toe, a good time to do it is a week before you have to do something incredibly physical that you just don’t want to… like walk down 100 flights of circular stairs in close quarters with 4000 other people in a mass evacuation of one of the sky highest high-rises in downtown Los Angeles.
Result!
My ex-colleague and also school friend, Tatiana de Wismes-Mounier was not so lucky. She broke her toe two weeks before her wedding when she accidentally stamped on it during a ballet class (long story) and she was getting married at St Paul’s Cathedral of all places. And for those of you who don’t know, St. Paul’s Cathedral is a large dramatic cathedral in central London where Princess Diana made the mistake/life choice of getting wed to Prince Charles (I mean the ears alone should put you off.) The aisle is veeeeeeery very long. Certainly not an aisle that you want to be limping down ever so slowly… You want to nobly sweep down it to the altar with a massive train flooding behind you. However poor Tatiana had to hobble along at the pace of a mostly paralyzed snail, tightly holding on to her father’s arm. I think it took her about twenty minutes to get to the end.
Now, that is an example of badly-timed broken toe.
