No one will ever accuse me of being graceful. If there's a piece of furniture in the room that is at shin or knee height, it is a guarantee that I will eventually slam into it. If there is a cupboard door open, I will inevitably smack it with my head. If there is something in the room - even if it has been there for years and I have successfully walked around it without injury a thousand times before, eventually I will manage to connect with it and find a way to hurt myself. My entire life is lived with a constant network of bruises, scrapes and scratches on my legs and arms and most of the time I cannot even remember how I got them.

I am telling you this so you will at least understand why it is that I managed to somehow slam my foot into the bottom of the cat tree at the top of the stairs last night, and quite possibly break my toe. I could claim that it was late and I was tired and in a rush to find Allegra and give her her nightly feeding of special food that must be stuffed down her throat, but the truth is that I would have been just as likely to do it if I was as awake and alert as I could ever be.

I am forever stubbing my toes on things - it comes with the territory when you are clumsy - but I’ve never done it quite this bad before. Usually there are a few moments of hopping around on the uninjured foot saying many colorful words that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap when I was much younger, and then it is fine. But this time I think I really did some damage to my little toe. It just kept hurting, and the pain got worse and worse until I was sitting on the bed with tears running down my face. Richard got me an ice pack, and called the advice nurse, and I slept with it elevated on a stack of blankets, the ice pack on it, all night.

I spent today limping around, feeling a little ridiculous since it seemed like a lot of fuss for a stubbed toe. I finally gave up after work and made an appointment to see a doctor because it just kept on hurting, and felt pretty idiotic going in to have them look at my toe because I couldn't manage to get out of the way of a cat tree which has been a stationary object in that house since we moved in over four years ago.

The good news is that whatever I did, I at least did not do any damage to the foot itself (unlike the oh-so-amusing time I was walking barefoot down my carpeted hallway, stepped sideways accidentally, and managed to break my foot). The doctor suggested I just buddy-wrap it to its neighbor and noted that due to the pattern of bruising (and a lovely purple shade it is, too), I probably did fracture it, but it wasn't too severe, and even if they did x-rays, they wouldn't do any more than just tell me to ice it and elevate it and for crying out loud, try to stay away from those toe-crunching cat trees in the future.

So this evening I am trying to just stay off my feet, and keep my stupid possibly broken toe elevated, and thinking that in my next life, along with being thin and having naturally wavy hair, I am also going to be at least a little bit more graceful. Because really, shouldn't I have outgrown this sort of thing by now?