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sprain along the Stick Trail
Tuesday, June 29 2004
In the afternoon Gretchen called me from a client's house to tell me that I needed to come and get her, that she'd twisted her ankle while jogging on the Stick Trail and now, hours later, it had become so painful she couldn't drive. So I enlisted the help of Ms. Meatlocker to drive me out to High Falls. We brought Sally and Eleanor with us, and they had a fun romp in the client's yard with her enormous unneutered purebred dog.
On the way home Gretchen had to sit in the back seat and keep her foot elevated. She groaned in pain with every minor bump. Once home, I carried her upstairs and set her down in front of the television and set her up with a little makeshift office consisting of containers of leftover party food, a cordless phone, the television remote, my laptop computer, and two different kinds of ice packs for her ankle. She ate a variety of painkillers, one of which contained a substance that made her drowsy. Later when she needed to go to the bathroom, she crawled there on all fours.
Though painful, Gretchen's ankle did not appear to swell very much, indicating the damage probably hadn't been too severe.
In my life I've had personal experience with only one sprained ankle, and it did not belong to me. Based on my familiarity with how that incident played out, it seems that delayed manifestation of symptoms is typical and cause for much additional damage, since people tend to continue doing whatever they had been doing before the spraining incident, unaware of the damage they've just inflicted.
Back in 1997 I sprained my left thumb when I caught myself while falling down a flight of stairs. It must have been a severe injury, since it swelled enormously and didn't fully recover for well over a year. But at least it didn't affect my ability to walk.
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