Toe Woes

Many generations ago, some mean old rotten witch put a curse on the maternal line of my family. Likely my great great great grandmother had stepped on her toe. And so, forevermore, the women in my family will be cursed with toe woes.

You'd think I would have learned by now that we should just invest in a sturdy pair of steel-reinforced army boots, and be done with it. But no. The women in my family aren't so much blessed with common sense as with tremendous aptitude for sarcasm.

I really only have direct knowledge of four generations of traumatized toes. But between us, we've had bunions, corns, fungi, ingrowns, funky nails, enlarged joints, and giant moles. That's right. Bring your camera. It's a real freak show.

I, in particular, am prone to toe injuries - at a rate only explainable by referring to the aforementioned curse. And I'm not talking about the garden variety stub here.

If there happens to be a brick falling from the heavens, it will fall on my toe. Never mind where it came from. Bricks, pipes, broken satellites, meteors, and runaway pianos seek me out.  I'm quite sure the 2001 stock market is looking for my toe as well.

Summertime is my worst toe season. Ever the optimist, I insist on wearing sandals like everybody else. And for the record, yes, I would probably jump off a cliff if everyone else did. I'm that weak minded.

"But the sandals are so CUTE this year" I always say. Because they are. Every year, the sandals improve their siren song. Even as large, heavy objects everywhere anticipate my approach.

I also, on occasion, paint my toenails. This exacerbates the toe curse by serving as a bulls-eye. I'm telling you, toenail polish is some bad juju. WET toenail polish can actually throw gravity all out of whack and pull motor vehicle tires in my direction.

Then there is the all-too-frequent doubling-up of toe woes. If, for example, I happen to be sporting a dozen or so stitches in my left big toe (as I am wont to be), it usually takes less than four hours for me to step on a bee, thus crippling my good foot. Needles, toothpicks, and rusty nails have also been quite obliging.

While I tend to wallow pitifully in my toe trauma, my mother handled hers in a completely different (but equally ineffective) way. She would just ignore them. "Look!" She'd say, "I think it's broken." And continue on with whatever she was doing. Toe sticking out 90 degrees, and everything. Yikes.

I couldn't do it. Although I have SEEN emergency room foot care, and it is not pretty. You get to wait all night, while people with knives sticking out of their heads waltz right past you, and in the end, after all the waiting, and the x-rays, and the furrowed brow consultations, they duct tape your toes together and send you home. The bill, of course, includes comprehensive care for a few of the knife victims.

Mom would have been very proud of me recently, when I dropped a 7-ton section of metal pipe on my toe. Not for dropping the pipe, mind you (that's a given) - but because I decided to forego medical care, as the kids were due at piano lessons. My foot throbbed at metronome=50, and I subsequently lost the nail, but priorities are priorities!

That mean old witch knew what she was doing. If she'd cast a more obvious spell, modern science would have taken care of us by now. But there's no incentive for science to conquer the pernicious curse that could be written off as clumsiness and bad luck. And anyway, they can charge double for that at the emergency room.