The day after the day the before

Having had a fall yesterday, minor but real, I began to realise just how fragile one’s existence can be as an apex predator. I mean, when you’re up there as the king of the jungle, everyone wants to take a pop at you. In my case, it was a screen door, mocking me so I would take a step back and admire my handiwork (which is, admittedly, never really handy), thus missing a step and falling hip-first into the wooden floor. It’s not easy being king. This must be how Mo Salah feels all the time.
 
Anyway, I actually slept through the night. Mrs. Ottawacker decamped to the basement—the scene of the crime—and left me to groan in the bed. As far as I know, there was no groaning. One moment I was lying there in pain, confident I wouldn’t have a second’s sleep, the next, it was a little after six and one of the cats was doing its best to open the door to the bedroom.
 
Moving was a little more complicated. Having located the crutches—on top of the cupboard in the furnace room, surrounded by the detritus of various murine expeditions over winter (shredded paper, desiccated droppings, the odd starved foetus) (and I just love that the collective noun for mice is a “mischief”)—I set about using them, clumping around the house like Long John Silver on the look out for recalcitrant sailors. (On reflection, that might not be the most appropriate simile.) I soon realised that the jolting was doing me little good, so packed it in and just sat at the computer.
 
Having showered, an event that took the best part of an hour, I was also in a position to take stock of the damage done. The outside of my foot was still very tender (but, for some reason, unbruised); my little toe was still swollen (but no longer the size of my big toe); and my hip was, well, different. The cricket ball/baseball-sized lump that had immediately formed—on reflection, this was the exact size of the cup on the top of my left femur—had reduced in size to a golf ball. It had also started to take colour. In fact, by the end of the day, it was a hip of many colours: I could have loaned it out to any of the groups represented at Pride and they could have used it as a promotional campaign. It was, I have to admit, significantly more painful than before, and so I started to pop the Tylenol. That helped. Having gone through a number of years believing Tylenol was part of the ASA/NSAID family of drugs, I had never taken them, thus depriving myself of a huge source of pain relief. This, children, is why it pays to actually read the labels on bottles and to do your research. They helped, as I said.
 
The day was, other than that, quiet. I managed to hobble up and down the stairs a number of times, did a fair bit of cataloguing and photo sorting. The sense of embarrassment slowly staring to subside… Slowly.