Ankle Wrench

I'm hobbling around here this morning. Left ankle stabs me like a knife with every step. I negotiate stairs only very carefully, and with difficulty. I can get around, more or less, long as I take it slow and easy.

Yesterday afternoon I slipped and fell on a mix of wet, slick grass and mud. Went right down, wrenched my ankle. First thought was, I hope I didn't break it— my mom fell and broke her ankle something over a year ago, it's not anything you want to deal with. Nope, my ankle was still intact. I could walk on it, support weight on it, bend it in every which direction. But painful.

Now I get up this morning, and it's painful and stiff. Oh well. Fortunately today is my day off, so I can just lay around. I suppose give it several days, and it'll be good as new. Or good as it was before— my left ankle is my bad ankle, I wrenched it up royally back when I was 15 and it's never been the same since. At least it can't get bunged up much worse than it was already.

Doctor? No, I'm not going to the doctor. I didn't go to the doctor for that ankle when I was 15, and I'm not going to the doctor now. Let's not get into the disconnect between me and doctors. I'd trust a doctor about as far as I could throw him. Or to be more precise, I'd trust a doctor about as far as I could throw Big Pharma and the health care industry, emphasis on assembly-line sausage-factory profit-turning industry. As Montaigne put it in his Essays:

I consult little about the alterations I feel; for these doctors take advantage; when they have you at their mercy, they cudgel your ears with their prognostics; and having once surprised me, weakened with sickness, injuriously handled me with their dogmas and magisterial fopperies— one while menacing me with great pains, and another with approaching death— by which threats I was indeed moved and shaken, but not subdued nor jostled from my place; and though my judgement was neither altered nor distracted, yet it was at least disturbed; 'tis always agitation and combat.