Perpetual Ruminations

What A Pain In The @$$

We had planned a different Thanksgiving this year, instead of going over to my sister-in-law's like we usually do, we decided to do a mini-vacation. We decided to visit the port city of Duluth and tour Bentleyville (https://www.bentleyvilleusa.org/visitor-guide/). We booked a room overlooking Lake Superior within walking distance for Thursday night.

The plan; have our Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday night, get a fairly early start on Thursday and drive to Duluth, check into our hotel, walk over to Bentleyville, then return and order pizza. That was the plan...

Things went afoul Wednesday! It was a beautiful day and the snow was melting, but by late afternoon, it was below freezing again. Unknown to me, the steps had been coated with ice, and I slipped on the top on, bounced down them, and landed hard on the concrete patio.

It took a couple of minutes to regain my senses and my breath. It took another minute to move various body parts to see if there were any that had broken. None seemed to be at the time, but when I rolled from my back to my stomach, I felt a wave of nausea wash over me.

I lay there another minute waiting for this to pass, then tried to get up. I could not, it was too icy... I managed to crawl over to the edge of the open porch and get hold of the decking, then with some difficulty, pull myself up onto my knees. I was up high enough now to rest my upper body on the deck floor and roll onto the porch. Luckily, I have a chair out there that I used to get up to my feet and drag my hurting body into the house.

Everyone came rushing to see how badly I was injured and my wife was asking if I needed to go to the emergency room. I had her assist me to my recliner, telling her I just needed to sit for a minute and determine how badly I had injured myself. She also said she would call and cancel our hotel reservations. The kids looked devastated but did not say anything except ask what they could do for me.

I did not have the heart to disappoint them and cancel our mini-vacation, besides it didn't seem like anything too serious. I informed them that the trip was still on, pending whether I could get out of bed the next morning or not. Humor always helps a situation and they jumped aboard with a bit of humor in return, "We'll get you out of bed in the morning, don't you worry about that!"

In truth, I could barely get myself into bed, did not sleep much at all, and was hurting much worse than I was going to let on to them. But with enough OTC pain meds, I managed to move pretty well and we headed out.

There was quite a bit of pain driving, there was a lot of pain getting in and out of the vehicle, and walking was painful as was standing or sitting.  After we returned to the hotel, I walked around in the pool; the cool water felt good. Then I soaked in the hot tub which really helped ease the pain for a while. The hotel mattress was firm and comfortable and I slept through the night.

Oh, being Thanksgiving, we could not find anything open that delivered, but the hotel front desk checked around and found an Old Chicago just a few blocks away that was open until midnight, so after the pool and hot tub we drove over and enjoyed a very wonderful dinner.

The next day we checked out and headed over to Superior Wisconsin and did a bit of sightseeing. We toured a turn of the center mansion and visited the last whale-back ship, the USS Meteor, as well as some other historic sites. By late afternoon it was time for dinner at Perkins, then the long drive home.

I was still in a lot of pain and there was no way to hide it, but I refused to let it ruin our fun and we all enjoyed the outing. In fact, it has been requested that we do this every year as our new Thanksgiving tradition.

As for me, I haven't moved much from my chair today. Both arms are bruised up, my entire back is black and blue, and I may have a cracked humerus (bad name, there's nothing funny about cracking this thing), and it's very likely I have once again busted my tailbone.