Doodle Doings

Non-Doodley event....I pass my black belt test!

So it’s been a while since I posted to my blog, and I can trace back to the exact moment things turned upside down to the degree that I no longer had time to write.

5/17/09, 4PM.

I have this loft bed I built up above the whelping area, and on that Saturday I had been up there taking a nap knowing I was going to be up all night with a dog, Emma, who was in labor.  But I knocked my glasses down from the place I keep them near the loft.  I can’t see more than 2 inches without them (literally) and missed a step coming down out of the bed. I fell a distance of about 3 feet, and landed with the ball of my foot on the edge of the whelping platform, the rest of my foot and weight went 4 inches down to the ground. So I sort of ripped my foot between the first two toes. Truly amazing amount of blood at the time. Poor Gus, my nine year old,  was the only one around and he was pale seeing pools of blood and towels soaked with it.  To his credit, he did hold it together enough to help me clean my foot up a little.  But I couldn’t do anything about the injury at the time except patch it up and tough it out,  because Emma was in labor. Over the next couple days my entire foot swelled and bruised, but because I needed to stay with Emma I was not able to go to the emergency room until Monday afternoon.

I did go to the emergency room on Monday, and the doctor was pretty funny. He didn’t really examine it, it was so discolored and swollen, he just sort of touched it with his index finger, saying, “You’ve been walking on this??? Let’s just get her to xray”. He recommended staying off it for 2 weeks, which I did as much as I could and still care for 4 adult dogs, 2 kids, and a litter of puppies!

Emma’s puppies were lovely, as always, and, as always, she did a great job with them.

One very big complication regarding my injury was that I was scheduled to take my black belt test on 6/20.  The two day test is only given once a year, and I did not want to miss it.   I knew from previously blowing out the ACLs in both knees that my foot was seriously damaged.  I also know if I told anyone how badly I was injured they would not allow me to take the test.   It was nearly impossible for me to train those 6 weeks before the test….the absolutely most critical weeks of training.  But I used lots of athletic tape to hold my foot together and took the test anyway.  A week later I went for an MRI, which showed 4 torn ligaments: two full tears and two partial tears.  I was immediately put in a ‘boot cast’ for 6 weeks.  A guy I train with, who also took the black belt test during those 2 days, is an orthopedic radiologist, and he offered to give me a second opinion on the MRI.  He confirmed the findings.  He did add that there was no way I should have gotten though that black belt test.  “I’m looking at your foot, and this joint is completely unstable” was his comment. I laughed and said, ‘Well Matt, you know that sucking it up is one of the things I do best’.  And he said, ‘I have to say, this is as much sucking up as I have ever seen.  It’s unbelievable.’  REALLY scary to have a huge heavy boot around little puppies; I literally lived in fear of a misstep as it would have killed one!

So life was very complicated for a while, between trying to train for my black belt test while badly injured, and then hobbling around in a honking big boot.   EVERYTHING seemed to take forever and longer, especially to someone who mostly moves at light speed.  Summer passed into fall.