Posted on 03/11/2004 7:20:00 PM PST by BluegrassScholar
I parted with my toenail yesterday and for once in my middle-aged life, damaging a body part was not due to an act of reckless stupidity on my part. I blame it on a cow, specifically the mad cow that stomped, gored and, for the most part, performed some sort of bovine modern interpretative dance over most of my body. And it was a mad cow as in angry, not mad cow as in its brain was turning to swiss cheese and it was bound for the nearest bologna factory. What made the cow mad? (That sounds like a line from a reading primer.) I was trying to tend to her calf, which had suffered an unfortunate encounter with a couple of coyotes, and the mama cow was just doing what came naturally. Still, it cost me the toenail on my left big toe.
I've been in bar fights, had teeth knocked out, suffered a broken nose, severed the end of my pinkie finger, wrecked a motorcycle, battled cat stratch fever (yes...the real kind, not the Ted Nugent song), been accidentally peppered with buckshot, had three operations, broken my ankle, had pins inserted in my ring finger, thrown from horses more times than I can count, fallen off the balcony of the Kappa Sig house...twice (once during an alumni weekend...I wasn't trying to recreate the infamous 1981 tumble, but I did inadvertently prove the adage that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it), taken numerous stitches to the scalp, burned my moustache and goatee doing one of those flaming shot drinks, tried to jump my Schwinn bike from the top of my neighbor's house to his pool...and missed, got tripped up in a (fortunately) somewhat-low-voltage electric fence while snipe hunting, skiied into a stump at Grenada Lake and executed a perfect back gainer off a pier in Panama City on a midnight double-kosher-dog dare from a beautiful Jewish girl from Atlanta...only to discover in mid-gainer, however, that it was low tide, meaning I landed in approximately five-eighths of an inch of water.
In all of these mishaps, I tried my best to walk it off, at least in those instances when I could walk and didn't require immediate evacuation by air ambulance. But when the podiatrist gave me an injection in the end of my toe and yanked the nail out, roots and all, I wanted to cry like an ugly bridesmaid at a pretty girl's wedding. In between screaming profanities like a Tourette's patient on crystal meth and yelling for someone to call the attorney that advertises on the back page of the phone book, I still had the presence of mind to ask the doctor for the nail. I think it will make a cool keychain.
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