A Quick Personal Update

Don't worry, though

As you know, I was in Seattle for the two Stars games over the weekend. It was a wonderful time seeing a city I love, catching up with old friends, and watching the Stars win two games against Seattle while we all continue to try to figure out just how unsustainable the current ride is/will be when the playoffs arrive in just over two weeks now.

But this post isn’t about hockey, at least not directly. It’s to let you know that my coverage over the next couple of days (or perhaps more) will be a bit less in-person, on account of a long-winded story I’ll try to keep short, which I have entitled I Am a Big Dummy.

I Am a Big Dummy

By Robert

So after the Stars beat Seattle Monday night and media stuff was all done, I packed up and walked over to the Seattle Monorail to get back down to where I was staying with some good friends south of the airport. Old roommates, actually, who live down where you can see Mt. Rainier on a clear day, or views like this on a rainy one (like we had Friday):

I am not a photographer. Anyway, I’d already decided I wasn’t going to pay $80 for an Uber all the way back to the house, as Seattle’s public transportation is pretty darn great. So I got on the Monorail (which is, like the Space Needle, a functioning relic from the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962) in order to connect with main Link light rail to head all the way down south for $2.75. Seemed like a good deal, so long as you don’t mind watching the odd character late on a Monday night/early in a Tuesday morning on public transportation.

At the southern end of the line, I got off the train to head down into the main parking lot area where an $8 Lyft was waiting to take me the final two miles home. Lyft was giving me those reminders about how the driver is going to leave if you don’t get there in time, blah blah blah, and so I determined not to waste time.

The station I got off at is elevated, so there’s a long escalator going down to the street level, after which you have to cross a road and then go up some stairs into the drop-off and pick-up area where my car was waiting.

And that is where I, being An Idiot Who Cannot Do Things, decided to take the stairs two at a time, and I approached them at a brisk trot while wearing a suit and a backpack, planning to take this last little obstacle in my journey in stride and arrive victoriously at my car just before the driver got tired of waiting and left.

The doctor later said they couldn’t believe I was wearing shoes, given what happened to my foot. It’s rare to see an “open dislocation” (don’t Google it if you don’t want to know) happen when someone isn’t barefooted, but I guess that’s just a testament to my brilliant powers of succumbing to gravity.

What took place, as best I’ve been able to reconstruct, is that I slipped on the first step, crashing into these stairs. Instinctively, my hands had come down, which accounts for my bruised and bloodied knuckles and palms and a little finger that might have a hairline fracture. But that all would have been fine, all things considered. Any fall you can walk away from is a minor one, and we’ve all tripped on some stairs at one point or another in our lives, right? (Please say “yes” here, out of sympathy if nothing else.)

Anyway, I picked myself up and limped up the stairs and into the waiting car, where I then realized my left foot was pretty numb. And that’s when I realized I probably needed to take off my shoe and sock and see what kind of a Situation we were talking about.

(I won’t include a picture here, but if you’d rather avoid the details you’ve already started imagining, feel free to skip the next paragraph.)

The second toe of my left foot was pointing The Wrong Direction. Or at least, some of it was, as the toe bone was clearly jutting out of the skin in the other direction. This is what puts the “open” in “open dislocation,” by the way. And while I’m not a doctor, I do know that when you see parts of your body that you’re not meant to, you probably need to tell your Lyft driver to change your destination.

So the gracious driver was able to find a nearby emergency room open at like 1am, where he even helped me walk into the lobby and get into a wheelchair before he promptly got outta Dodge. (Yes, I tipped him well.)

The rest is boring medical stuff, but the old saying holds true: when your condition interests or surprises medical professionals, it’s probably a suboptimal one. Still, the ER folks were excellent (as they always seem to be, in my experience) and I eventually got back to the house in time to pass out for a couple of hours before my flight the next morning, where I learned all about how you request a wheelchair and how airplane aisles are actually not too bad to navigate on one foot.

Now I’m back in Dallas, where I got to discover that Blue Cross Blue Shield has now picked this exact month to drop a host of Texas health care providers, including my own.

Those details are even more boring, so we’ll skip to the end here: I really, really, really, really, really wish I’d just taken the outlandish surge-pricing Uber/Lyft/Gorp and gone straight home, as that would have been a great deal less expensive than what I’m going to end up shelling out.

I’m not walking right now—I suspect some ligament damage, but I’ll find out more tomorrow at a follow-up with a podiatrist—so I’m going to be covering the next couple of Stars practices and games from home. But I’ll still be covering them and writing, and my ultimate hope is that I’ll be back on my feet within a week or two, well in time for all the craziness of the playoffs, by which time Dallas will surely have overtaken Winnipeg while giving up 50 shots a night just to prove they can.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go hobble back to bed.