Stop bragging…

I’ve told you guys before that every time I brag about being a great cook, I mess up the simplest things… it could be boiled egg, or two minutes noodles and I’ll burn it, or overcook it, or add a bucket of salt. I believe that it’s the Universe’s way of telling me to not brag. It has happened too many times for it to be just a coincidence. Now I just cook my food in silence and I never voice the thought that I probably deserve to feature in my own cooking show. Sometimes I take pictures of my food, sometimes I share the pictures. If there’s a man in my life, I will feed him to death. 

Anyway, on Wednesday evening, during prayers in church, I thanked God for divine health. So early Thursday morning, I went off on my morning jog. I’m not as consistent with jogging as I used to be. In fact, the only reason I began jogging again after months of uncontrolled stress eating was because my weight had started to really depress me. My clothes no longer fit and I could no longer get away with “sucking” my belly in. So two weeks ago, when I stepped on the scale and saw that I had hit 90kg, I took drastic action; I went on a low carb diet and started intense cardio. 

Back to Thursday morning. While jogging, I had only gone a few meters when I tripped on a small bump on the pavement and fell hard. I fell with my whole body, face included. How hard you ask?

I hit my head and scraped my right cheek on the pavement. 

My right shoulder is scratched up and bruised.

My right knee is scratched up and bruised and there’s a big bump there. 

My right ankle is swollen cos I twisted it in the fall.

My phone screen is shattered.

Best of all, my right wrist is swollen and the nail on my fourth finger tore from the nail bed.

(By the way, can you guess from reading this that I fell on my right side? 😒)

A guy who had been jogging ahead of me heard me scream (or maybe he felt the ground shake from the fall). He ran back to see if he could help. He kept asking me questions, “Jesus! Are you OK?” “I’m sorry” “Are you hurt?” “Do you need help getting up?”

I was cursing under my breath. My knee hurt like a motha and the  pain from the broken fingernail was unbearable. I couldn’t see the extent of the damage because it was bleeding badly. While on my knees, on the pavement, I did not have the presence of mind to respond to Cardio Oprah asking me all those plenty questions. He eventually gave up, said one final “Sorry o” and jogged off. I limped home, totally consumed by the pain and bleeding in my finger. I rinsed off the blood and saw that it wasn’t as bad as I thought, but it was bad enough. My over-sabi inner nurse did a temporary dressing on the finger and on the wound on my knee. Then I got ready and went to work. I felt sore, but I was sure I could manage. 

I’m not sure who I was trying to impress by going to work because a few hours later, I was sitting in the emergency room of a hospital, waiting to get an x-ray done. By that time, my wrist and ankle were swollen to twice their normal size and my nail had bled through the dressing. My cheek was hard and swollen. All the questions from the hospital staff were irritating me. They found it difficult to grasp how someone could just… fall. And I felt increasingly foolish every time I told the story. It would’ve made more sense to them if I had said that I was pushed out of a moving car by an angry passenger. Or  that I got into a fight.

The award for dumbest question goes to the doctor who examined me. He asked, “How come all the injuries are on the right side of your body?” and I told him that I only wore the left side of my body armor that morning. Other than that, I was a good patient.

X-ray reports showed that my bones are fine, but there’s “deep tissue swelling” in both my wrist and ankle. They gave me three injections, a small bag of painkillers and sent me home to rest. 

Has your favourite blogger been resting? Not really. I went to work for the next two days, but with only one fully functional hand, I was slow and very stiff. I’m resting now though. I’ve been in bed since yesterday afternoon with my feet up, just like the doctor ordered. I didn’t even go to church today. I only get up to eat and use the bathroom. My mother calls me every other hour to remind me that I could’ve been crushed by an oncoming vehicle. I can only imagine what her testimony in church today was like. In her version, I probably fell and rolled to the side of the road, narrowly missing being run over by a diesel truck that was on top speed.

Anyway, that concludes the story of the time I almost split my skull on the pavement while I was jogging. The only good thing to come out of this is that my swollen right cheek gave me the perfect Tyra Banks cheekbone… too bad it’s on only one side of my face. Also, I might get a 10% discount on every manicure for  the next two months. The saddest part is that I’ve lost only 3.5kg.