Several!

Have you ever broken a bone?

• Broke my foot when I was six and my best friend jumped off the see saw; I fell down suddenly, and landed directly on that foot, breaking the bone just above my big toe* and had to wear a cast for nine weeks, which is the same thing as nine months to a six year old.
• Broke my tailbone at my best friend’s sixteenth birthday party; she was rollerblading and pulling me behind her. Except I didn’t know how to rollerblade at all, and when she went over a speed bump, my feet went out from under me and knocked hers out from under her, bringing her down on top of me and both of us on top of my tailbone. Nothing has ever hurt so much in my life! I couldn’t walk right for weeks and couldn’t sit right for months, and even now, literally decades later, sometimes I still get pain there if I sit too long on too hard a chair.**
• Broke my nose when I was hit by a car when I was sixteen***. It hit me square on the hip, dislocating my leg, but not breaking it; when I came down, I came down on my face and snapped the cartilage from the bone in my nose and broke one of my teeth out of my upper jaw. It could have been a lot worse, and considering that I had road rash from my hairline to my sternum, it looked worse than it was.
• Broke my ribs when I was early thirties, from slipping in the tub. Landed across the side, and cracked two or three ribs along the side, which led to months of pain, and after I got a cough that made it worse, triggered the costachondritis that was what got me my fibromyalgia diagnosis. That one still aches quite a lot; it’s right where my bra line is, so just about anything more than a little tight across the ribs will make it hard to breathe, or will make shooting pains through my whole rib cage.
• Also maybe a toe one time, maybe my face a different time I was hit by a car****, almost my wrist one time wrestling with a cousin…

What can I say, I’m a scar baby.

• Best of the week’s links
• Goodbye Mr Charlemagne Greyskull the Third Esq
• Fall!
• From You’ve Got This
• Wifi, my beloved

NOTES:

*that foot is a half size smaller now; finding shoes is interesting. don’t break your feet when you’re still growing, kids!

**or ride a bike too long. like how I used to bike-commute everywhere. so my butt always hurt.

***this was about a year, maybe fifteen months after breaking my tailbone. dislocating my hip miraculously didn’t make the tailbone worse.

****this was a less bad time, despite the fact that I was clipped by a side view mirror and flipped over the handlebars on my bike and also landed on my face. I’ve been hit by cars I think four times? perils of Florida, a terrible place to be a pedestrian at all, it’s consistently on the worst lists, and then also I have ADHD, which makes you more likely to be in traffic accidents*****.

*****apparently even without being in a car of your own. I’m out of Florida now, no longer biking everywhere, and kind of phobic about roads, so the accidents are down. I don’t want to wind up with that condition you get from repeated brain injuries.