Time Flies With A Broken Toe

Wow, I can’t believe that tonight marks six weeks since I was sitting in the Emergency Room waiting to find out the status of my poor toe. In some ways, I feel every minute of those six weeks. I watched the leaves change through the windows, and I’ve barely wandered past the steps for ages. And when I think back to hobbling up the stairs with a severely sprained ankle several years ago, I’m suddenly so happy to be living in a one story house this time. Getting around was enough of a pain without stairs.

I’ve managed to make decent use of the sitting time to finish uploading my collection of Galway art and the rest of my Ireland prints to my Fine Art America account and I even got  a nice chunk of Georgia art done by uploading my Tybee Island photos into a Coastal Georgia gallery. I believe my Egypt art will be next. I’ve done a few as the mood struck but have yet to have a concerted effort. It’s a decent sized collection but dwarfed by my Mexico work…. Sigh! In other words, I would need a mess of broken feet to get this done in one go, but it’s worthwhile. The Fine Art America account has more than paid for itself, and I don’t believe it’s by cannibalizing the sales on my Zenfolio-based site. I will maintain a site under my own domain for the foreseeable future, but my time on Fine Art America verifies what I believed when I opened an account there. It may not seem fair, but all things are not equal. The same work on a highly visible domain is just plain more likely to be discovered by collectors. So, I’m motivated to get the rest of my work there soon as possible.

I digress… It may have seemed a while in some ways, but in my typical paranoia, it doesn’t feel nearly long enough to have fully healed. When I broke my foot, I was told to wear the hard-soled recovery shoe and to buddy tape the toe for six weeks. And I only needed to see another doctor for it if I experienced pain. Well, thankfully as soon as the swelling went down, the pain has been entirely governed by my trying to do too much. As long as I kept off it as I was told to do, no ouchies. But I’ve become used to training wheels and treating my foot with kid gloves. And it’s very intimidating to imagine shedding it all tomorrow based entirely on the calendar….

Well, technically it’s just shedding the buddy tape tomorrow. I stopped wearing the recovery shoe in the house a few days ago. As I got a bit more mobile, it had started making the outside of my foot (opposite side from the injury) sore – gotta love wide feet. So, I decided to try getting around gingerly without it slightly ahead of schedule. I think this was my version of slowly pulling the tape off. But tomorrow it will be time to genuinely pull the tape off, and I still have mental images of my toe flying off its hinges. Ha! I don’t know why. It’s not as if I haven’t changed the bandages several times over in six weeks, but fears aren’t always logical!

I can already tell my foot is going to be majorly stiff and sore after six weeks of not flexing it. So I’m not even sure I’ll be able to tell immediately if everything is alright or not. It may take a day or two to get a good feeling for whether or not I’m genuinely ready to roll. Here’s hoping this is not like the sprained ankle from 2007. That time, I ended up having surgery, not directly from the fall but because it aggravated a bone spur that was already there. Fingers crossed….