How I Spent My Saturday

After a long day of shopping with my dad, I came home exhausted, but still anticipating the night ahead: possibly baking the Sprinkles cupcake mix I picked up(and making my own buttercream) or baking the pumpkin cobbler recipe from Williams Sonoma. Unfortunately, something else was in store for me.

Falling on my face. Literally, falling on my face. Luckily my knee would break the fall, and no bloody gashes or abrasions would mar my pretty face/hands. No, my knee would take one for the team, so to speak, and cushion my fall.

The night began like any other Saturday night, with me begging Paul to go out to eat because I hate cooking on a weekend, especially since I had just spent all day slaving away at the malls. Ha ha.

Finally, after harassing my dear husband long enough, he gave in to trying out this new Mexican place a few blocks away, enough blocks to not want to walk. So I put some yoga pants on (Paul had just washed them, isn't ge a great husband?), and being lazy I decided to forgo the actual act of putting on shoes, and slipped on a pair of crocs (mary jane style, which is still no excuse for being an adult and owning crocs, I know) and headed out with Paul.

The Mexican place was on a street that has a popular bar (Paul's been there many times as his friends hang out there) and a few good Chinese places, so we had to park around the corner and across the street. As we were walking to the restaurant to order our food to go, we passed by a store called "My Baby Jo", a vintage store that has some pretty cool stuff, including a vintage cardigan with kittens embroidered on it that i couldn't take my eyes off of. It was precisely as I was looking back at the sweater and calling to Paul, "Honey! It's a sweater with KITTIES on it!" when my stupid clunky croc hit a ledge in the concrete (the cement had been broken, so there was a hole AND a ledge) and I pivoted onto my face, spreading out like a water balloon on contact with a sidewalk. My purse was still somehow on my shoulder, only like the rest of me, it had sprawled out across the sidewalk.

It took seconds to fall, but felt like milliseconds. One moment I was coveting a sweater, the next I heard a smacking sound and felt the ground on my face. Paul was standing beside me, looking down at me with his mouth open, incredulous. He told me to get up, because I had beefed it in an alley and a car was waiting to turn. Since the option of being swallowed into the ground was unavailable at that time, I had to have Paul heft me to my feet, as I started to black out. That damn vasovagal syncope began to rear it's "medical oddity" face, and I got woozy. My knee hurt, my hands stung and I was about to be sick, right across the street from where Paul's friends hang out. On a Saturday night. The horror.

I told Paul I was going to black out, and he made me breathe in and out as I staggered to the restaurant, only a few yards away. We got inside, I leaned on the counter and laughed my ass off. It's one of my coping mechanisms- before I began to pass out when hurt, my go-to move was laughing in the face of extreme pain. Ha ha on YOU, sprained ankle! Now the joke's on me, "you laugh at my pain?", the ankle said, "I make the blood drain out of your head and you fall down. How do you like THAT?"

We ordered our food to go and I sat down to inspect the damage. One busted knee, two red, stinging palms and a swimming head. Sadness. More than anything I was angry because the pants were newly washed, and now I had to go and get blood and bits of skin on the inside. Way to go, Amber. I couldn't bend my knee, and it was starting to swell already. My leg began to hurt from my knee to my hip bone, and I couldn't help but feel sorry for myself. I really began the pity party when Paul started laughing at me. "Why didn't you call out or reach for me? I feel bad that I didn't catch you", he said. I had to remind him that had I KNOWN I was falling I could probably have done something about it, ya know? He marveled on how bad my hand-eye coordination is, and said, "You know, most people could catch themselves". I said, "Most people aren't morons, then".

Finally our order was ready, and I hobbled back to the car, Paul's hand on mine with the reminder to not look at anything other than the floor. It was then I saw the shattered remains of a packet of saltines, one of four that I had filched from Dad's lunch that day. Seeing it on the floor like that, its plastic wrapper looking so dejected and unloved, I actually contemplated picking it back up. Heck, I knew where it had been (before the sprawl), and I'll be honest, I was quite looking forward to snacking on it at work the following Monday. Still, my paranoia about bending down and eating floor crackers got the best of me, and I apologized for wasting its precious salty life and moved on. Slowly.

When we got back to the car, Paul immediately put the food in the backseat, and grabbed the first aid kit out of the trunk. Not just any first aid kit, this one is one Paul created for all the various sports injuries he has to deal with. So, he swabbed my knee with alcohol (oh my god, I almost passed out again from that pain alone), covered it with a large bandage, and then grabbed an instant ice pack and saran-wrapped it to my knee. Seriously. He has a neat little stick thing that the wrap goes on so it's easy to wrap knees and ankles and such. If there is ever an accident, you can trust my husband- fluent in first aid!

At home, I hobbled up the stairs to our apartment and fell onto the couch, where my loving husband laughed at me ("I'm sorry honey, it's funny!") and brought me my food, drinks and silverware. The pain was no longer the burning pain of an abrasion, now it was the throbbing pain of a swollen knee, how fun this was. I took three Tylenols, one rapid release and two nighttime, and got comfortable. That night's sleep was miserable.

The next morning we were going out for breakfast so I had to get dressed. I tried to put pants on, but with a knee that won't bend and a hot day combined, I just put on a pair of denim shorts. It wasn't pretty, but at least I could walk without grimacing when the fabric brushed my knee.

Now it's been almost 5 days since "the incident", and my knee doesn't hurt as much. it's still hard to bend, but only because it's scabbed over by now, and anything that causes my knee to bend pulls on the scabs. Disgusting. The bruises are darker and my leg has stopped aching, the swelling is mostly gone. What a day I had.