Perpetually Clumsy

Feb 21
Amy

I have found that no matter what my activities are, my clumsiness follows me like a lost puppy.  It’s that proverbial bad penny that keeps turning up no matter how hard you try to get rid of it.  I honestly don’t remember being super clumsy as a young child, and I think my string of injuries and bad luck started around 5th Grade with one fateful day playing in the snow.

My sister and I were at our friends’ house playing in the snow, building snowmen, making snowforts, having snowball wars, and playing hard.  My friend Nate and I were having a snowball fight, and I climbed up on their wood stack to throw a snowball at him.  Unfortunately, I lost my balance and fell off INTO A SNOWBANK and broke my arm!

From there, my injuries just got funnier and more odd as time went on. 

I broke the growth plate in my foot running cross-country in 7th Grade, so every time my foot grew a significant amount, my foot broke.  Enter 9 casts and/or walking boots over the next three years.  One time, my foot had completely healed, and I was at the doctor getting my cast off.  As I left the doctor’s office, my crutches slipped on the ice and I slammed my foot into the sidewalk re-breaking my foot.

Then there was the time I went off the high dive at the swimming pool, landed on the water wrong and injured my knee.  I broke my wrist when I got excited playing a video game.  I dislocated my shoulder playing intramural softball in college, and then about 2 weeks later, I got hit in the calf by a line drive and ended up with such a deep bruise that went from my ankle halfway up my hamstring and I had to have physical therapy to treat it.  😉

Or, one of my personal favorites from the first day of school of my Senior Year.  I had just started at a brand new school, and I didn’t know very many people.  Moving schools was hard enough, and I was excited about the change but nervous, too.  I remember that I was walking into the main hallway where the high schoolers had their lockers (Cove is a K-12 school), and I was running away from my friend, Cade.  I was doing just fine until my feet got the better of me and I tripped.  I didn’t just trip and fall, I tripped, fell, and burned – like rug burn all down one side of my face, my arm, and my leg.  The worst part was laying there on the floor, knowing that it was a major transition time for all the classes, and the entire junior high and high school student body just witnessed my humiliation!  Ugh!

I re-injured my previously injured knee while I was working for the Forest Service the summer after high school and spent three and a half weeks in a hip to ankle cast because the doctor didn’t trust me to leave a brace on.  Then I broke my other knee jumping out of bed to take care of Reagan when she was a baby – Nice. 

So basically, you get the picture.  I’m a huge clutz!  I trip across painted lines on floors on a daily basis!

Today, I was out and about with Janie, taking her senior pictures, and I managed just one little slip (and that was even on snow) the entire day until the very end.  Then I blew it!  Janie and I saw something that we wanted to include in some of her pictures, and we both took off at a jog towards it.  Well, as I took off, I felt and heard a “POP” in my left calf.  I’m not sure what I’ve done to myself, but it’s bad.  I can’t walk right – I look like a peg-leg pirate with a wooden leg that’s about 6 inches too long.  It’s painful, but isn’t swollen yet.  I’ve spent the evening relaxing, icing it, and trying to get it to feel better.

Now that I’ve gotten my newest stupid injury, I think I’ll go bury my head in the sand or wrap myself in bubble wrap.