I thought I would elaborate on my broken toe and how it happened. It is hard for me to admit I am stupid sometimes :-P but this lesson will hopefully influence other people who read this to practice safe lawn mowing habits.

When I was mowing the lawn on Sunday, it got stuck on the edge of the grass in some mud so I used my foot to push it out. Bad idea. Come to think of it, I have always used my foot to push the mower when needed. So what I've learned from this is to never use your foot to do anything with a mower. My foot slipped underneath the mower and it grazed the top of my foot. I was lucky because it only cut one toe, the fourth smallest one. The blade grazed the third toe and gave it a little scrape. The cut was about 1/2 deep into the toe. The damage was that it cut the skin (obviously), the tendon into two pieces, one artery, busted the joint capsule open, and decimated about 1/4 inch of the small toe bone at the end. Pulverized it into a powder, and left a small chipped piece which they did not retrieve because it would have required cutting. God makes our bodies with rendundant parts so your toes each have two arteries for blood supply. I had one uncut artery, which is the only reason why I still have a toe right now. The first thing we looked at after it happened is that the toe was turning blue or still pink, and fortunately it was pink (and purple).

Five days after this accident, I am no longer using crutches, which is also a testament to how quickly our bodies heal. It still has a ways to go, still sore, but I can hobble around as a bipedal animal again.

My father wants me to get a new mower (mine is very old) because the new ones have a safety feature when you let go of the handle, the blades stop turning. That would not have helped me in this situation because I was still holding onto the handle. Safety features on mowers are nice and can prevent accidents, but let's say a child runs out in the yard up to the mower and then slips and falls underneath it. The safety feature is not going to prevent that kind of accident. I know that I will never cut the grass again (or use a weed eater) without wearing steel toe boots. And probably will never use a chain saw again, though I'm one of those crazy people who find cutting things up with a chain saw to be a wonderful stress buster.

Accidents like this one happen in a flash. I deeply regret that it happened and am thankful it wasn't worse. But it served as a reminder that accidents can happen so quickly - if we knew they were coming, we would have avoided them.

The long term effects of this will be minimal - I may have some arthritis in that joint for the rest of my life. I should be back on the bike again in about a week to ten days.

One thing people keep asking me is how bad it hurt. When you experience a trauma, for a few minutes you can't feel it at all. Then the pain came and I got used to it. When we drove to the ER, the air circulating in the car was causing much pain because when you get a cut to the bone, air touching the bone is not a pleasant thing to feel. The next painful experience was when the doctor put shots in the toe to numb it up. Those were extremely brief. Then the nurse put a shot of antibiotics in my hip, and I thought my leg was burning and would fall off any minute. Truly the worst pain of the whole thing was that stupid shot. I refused any pain medications. I've felt far worse pain before than this. On a scale of 1 to 10, at times it was a 5 or 6 at the most. My pain tolerance is decent. That's why I can suffer on the bike. :)