The Hazards Of Geocaching

Southern Man loves to geocache. In fact it's possible that he's a little obsessive about it. So on a beautiful Sunday afternoon after church and lunch with friends he headed for the lake to pick up a few caches; in particular, one he'd looked for a few times and not found but some recent log entries gave him hope that it was there and waiting for him.

Supposedly the cache was in a tree near this bridge.

Well, Southern Man followed the hints and climbed the tree and found nothing and came back down and then while actually back on the ground stepped on a root or something and twisted the fark out his ankle. And the twisting was accompanied by a loud "pop" and movement where none was expected up above the boot.

There was yelling and screaming and perhaps a tear or two were shed but Southern Man managed to hobble back to the car and since he didn't find that cache he drove to the next one on his list and limped through the woods and found it and logged it (thus satisfying his CDO-fueled desire to maintain his streak of daily finds) and then went to the laundromat where he somehow manages to get the laundry started and then settled down for a consultation with Dr. Internet...



...who said "if the affected ankle can't support any weight at all, it's probably broken."

Well, this was a good thing; since Southern Man could hobble around on it (after a fashion) it was probably just a bad sprain and since he was not in much of a mood to go to the emergency room and pay them ungodly sums of hard-earned money just so they could wrap it up and tell him to put ice on it and send him home and by Divine Providence he was already scheduled for a physical the next morning with his usual physician so he decided to just grin and bear it and let The Doc check it out on Monday morning and in the meantime dropped by Wal-Mart for a big bottle of ibuprofen and a wrap and decided that CVS charging $60 for a stick was too much and went home without one where he mixed a pitcher of 'ritas and pulled out his lone reserve hydrocodone from a two-year-old prescription (having forgotten that they keep him awake) and made chicken nachos and put a stack of DVDs in the player and settled down for an evening of eating and movie watching and generally not moving at all.

He left the boot on until midnight figuring that given how much that foot was swelling that would be the best compression he would get...

...might should have left that boot on...

...and took that hydrocodone and after a sleepless night (damn hydrocodone) he found out the next morning that there was no way on God's green earth that the boot would go back on so he put on a sandal and made his way to The Doc. In The Hyundai, which would turn out to be a mistake. Where he found out that (a) he had better get back on the Southern Man Diet and also that (b)...

Dr. Internet was wrong!

That's broken bone number three for Southern Man; the second was after a morning of intense but fall-free snow-skiing after which he tripped in the slush down by the lift and broke his arm and the first was (no kidding) when he broke a finger playing an arcade game at the mall. Sometime this week he will go to a specialist and get it set (which they won't do until the swelling goes down) and in the meantime dropped by the pharmacy to rent crutches and then went downtown with physician-signed forms in hand - first to the Department of Transportation and then to the Department of Public Safety - for a permit to park here:

And he wasn't the least bit shy about asking for it, either.

So now Southern Man is at work (grades are due by noon tomorrow) with a throbbing foot that is not at all looking forward to driving a stick back home. Lord, grant me safe passage home and quick healing. Amen.