A few things have been going on in the last week which is why I’ve remained silent.  Last Thursday I stepped down into the goat stall as I was getting ready to put everyone away for the night, and I rolled my ankle.  Seriously, I heard that gross popping sound and I face planted into the straw.  Thing was is that though I am usually awesome and paranoid about bringing my phone with me at all times I decided not to take off my muck boots and go back into the house to retrieve my phone not 5  minutes before.  So there I was, laying on my face in agony with the almost certainty that I’d broken my ankle.  My husband wasn’t due home for another 2 hours and it is a long way back from the barn to the house when you are a cripple.

So I sat there for a moment and took a deep breath of the musky straw of the goat stall and remembered that I am not the ‘wait to be saved’ type.  I go onto my knees – my poor unreliable angry knees – and crawled out of the stall trying not to hit my foot to hard on the floor below because every tap was agony.  I used bits of straw and fallen hay as knee pads as I crawled on my hands and knees down the cement hallway toward the door.  The whole time – and this is probably stupid – I was physically saying to myself “I can do this.” over and over again.  Every shuffle of the knee and hand was “I can do this.”  Oddly though I still wasn’t crying.

Pretty pathetic right? Yeah, well, I knew once I got to the door of the barn I had 20 feet of mud to the fence and a bunch of goats who wanted their grain more than anything so I decided I’d test it.  I pulled myself to my feet and with the aid of one of the Mr’s many 2×4′s I took my first tentative step.  It hurt like hell but I could move.  So I did.  I used that 2×4 as a bastardized cane and moved as quickly as I could through the barnyard and through the yard and into the house where I had enough thought to grab and icepack before falling onto the couch and reclining as far as I could to elevate the offending joint.  I went fast because I knew that I was working on adrenaline and that it would probably wear off at any moment.  And it did.  Just about the moment I heard my husband’s voice on the other end of the phone.

So yeah.  We had a lovely little ER trip to our local hospital where I was checked in by a woman too bored with me to stop looking at houses and who got snippy with me about my -completely abnormal for me - high blood pressure.  HA! You know, the only people who make a big deal out of that are people who’ve never been hurt so bad they needed to go to the ER before.  Unless you’ve felt that fear and pain you can shut your sweet ass up.  My blood pressure was high because I was in pain, because I was terrified I wasn’t going to make it out of the barn by myself, because I had already broken this ankle when I was 13 and have two screws in it, and I was terrified that I would be out of commission for 8 weeks.

People, I have stuff to do.  I’m too busy to be a cripple for that long.

So 4 hours later I was greeted with the news that it was NOT broken.  People, I felt like I had just won the lottery at that point.  Everything else didn’t matter, I was as good as gold.

So yeah. My wonderful husband took amazing care of me for the next 3 solid days.  I hobbled on crutches and scooted around the house on a rolly chair and did my best to keep completely off it for that time.  The swelling went down and the bruising came - omg it is SO bruised! – and I’m able to walk around pretty confidently now with aid of a brace.

To celebrate let’s have a contest!  Comment here with your worst injury and I’ll pick 5 random people (with help of the random number generator) to win 3 patterns of mine of their choice.  You have until Monday the 27th before I’ll pick my winners.

And though this has nothing to do with the post here are some goats.