Never underestimate the importance of your little toe. Allow me to explain. Anyone who knows me can tell you that I do not so much talk as orate.
I gesture and move, making a conversation as much visual as it is auditory. This remains true even when I am talking on the phone.
So over this past summer, when I was on the phone, I started pacing around the room as I talked. Now, I am not what anyone would call “reasonably coordinated,” but I figured that I should still be relatively safe while walking around my living room. This, however, was not the case.
In the middle of one of my diatribes, as I was pacing near the couch, my keen spatial senses failed me, and all of a sudden I was on the ground clutching my foot and swearing.
Did I mention that I don’t react well to pain?
Shortly thereafter, I investigated the damage. My little toe was looking a little more swollen than normal, but it didn’t hurt. Doing what any reasonable person would do, I poked it to make sure that it didn’t hurt.
If any of you are in this situation, I recommend not following my example. It turns out that it only hurt when I touched it, or rather, when it touched other things, and that poking it hard with my index finger was the sort of thing to make it hurt again. Additionally, I might point out here that I am also not what anyone would call “of average common sense.”
Two days later the toe and surrounding foot-region was purple. A nice dark purple. Well, it would have been nice had it been in a painting rather than my flesh.
One thing that I did take away from this experience was a newfound appreciation of what my little toe does. See, I never noticed the little toe before in any specific capacity. It doesn’t do too much that the other four don’t and often I had wondered if it was really doing much of anything at all.
The answer to that question is yes. When one mangles a toe as I did, you are reminded with every step that it is doing something. Each instance of shooting pain is an indication of a job that the toe was doing silently before and is making me forcefully aware of just how much and how often it works.
So, let my story be a warning to you – don’t wander around while talking if you are uncoordinated, and if you think your toe may be broken, don’t poke it really hard to find out.
Powell can be reached at lpowell@campustimes.org.
