This morning was more relaxed for me, thanks to my family taking care of critter feeding. Before heading out to take my mother to her doctor’s appointment, I just had to switch out the memory card on the trail cam, then do some of my usual walk-about.

While walking in the outer yard, past where the grass is overgrown between trees, I noticed a large area of the grass trampled down. Some creature or creatures had surely been tumbling about in there!

As a paused to look, there was an explosion of cats and kittens from under one of the trees!

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I wasn’t able to get pictures of all of them, but there were at least 4 kittens, plus Butterscotch and Beep Beep.

The kittens have now officially expanded their territory beyond the inner yard!

Which is a good thing, in that they’re getting bigger and braver, but not a good thing, as it’s more dangerous for them, and it’ll make it harder to catch them when it comes time to put them in for the night, or for when we find families to adopt them.

They are such sweet kitties!

The plan was for me to get my mom to the clinic nice and early, but I also left a bit earlier to gas her car up, since her new doctor is in a town much closer to the city. In the end, we got there even earlier than planned. As I let them know at the desk that she was there, I figured I’d take advantage of being at a medical clinic and asked if it was possible to get my toe looked at. I dislocated it more than a week ago, and it’s still looking like a little fat toe sausage. I’m fairly used to having a metatarsal in my feet dislocate, and the pain was… different. So I wanted to just have it checked out, just in case I actually broke something.

The clinic doesn’t take walkins, but when I mentioned why I wanted to have my toe looked at, the receptionist checked the schedule and found that one of the doctors had an opening shortly before my mother’s appointment. In fact, she told me, he might be able to take me in even earlier.

It all worked out perfectly. He took me in at the earlier time, briefly checked my foot and we talked about the injury. He wrote me up for an Xray, which is just across the hall. He told me it would take about 45 minutes for him to get the Xray and examine it, and asked me to just wait until then.

I went across the hall and had only a few minutes to wait for the Xray. My foot was already hurting a bit more from the doctor poking at my toe to isolate where the pain was. The Xray technician had to get a couple of angles and, in one of them, she had to isolate my toe. She ended up using a tongue depressor under that to, and over the others, taped in place. She tried to be careful not to hurt it. As we were talking, I told her how, since my feet always hurt, it was hard for me to even determine just how bad the pain was. The pain scale is a relative thing. She completely understood, telling me she’s had a few patients tell her the same thing. By then, I could feel my pulse throbbing in my toe, so she worked quickly to get it done.

By the time I got out, my mother had been called in for her appointment. On seeing me, I was led to the examination room she was in, where a med student was setting her up to get her blood pressure, etc. He handled it very well when she used asking him if he was Canadian to launch into a racist diatribe about Canada bringing in doctors from Africa and India. 😦

The next while was spent talking about a number of things – he was able to call up the results of the chest Xray she got the last time, and everything came back fine. Which is really frustrating my mother, because with her shortness of breath, she is expecting them to find something.

A lot got discussed, and they were very good with not letting my mother get away with trying to force them to make decisions for her, and brushed passed her rudeness completely. In the end, she will be going for a CT scan to try and track down a pain in her side that she thinks is a hernia, but isn’t, and my siblings and I are doing to have a discussion with her about knee surgery. The issue is not with getting the surgery – she could really use a new set of knees! – but whether or not she’ll be willing to do the post-surgical rehab that will be required.

Part way through, there was a knock at the door. The doctor that had seen me for my toe popped his head in. He already got the Xrays and was ready to see me, so as soon as we were done with my mom’s appointment, I was led to another examination room for myself! 😀 While I was waiting for the doctor, I also got the paperwork to get my mother’s medical files transferred to the new doctor, and I had enough time to fill in what I needed to, first.

The doctor was a sweetheart and actually took photos of my Xrays, so he could show them to me. 😀 He brought one of them up on his phone, zoomed in and…

Well, now.

There it was.

A very clear and obvious fracture.

Right in the first phalange, where he had poked at it earlier! No wonder it started hurting more so quickly!

I’ve been walking around with a broken toe for the past week.

Thankfully, there is nothing problematic about the fracture itself. All I’ll need to do it make sure to tape it to the middle toe every day. He also suggested wearing shoes one size larger. Which is not gonna happen, since I’m already wearing triple wide men’s shoes. So I guess it’s going to be sandals for the next while. He also said to take painkillers; basic Ibuprofen is good enough, and I already take that for my osteo-arthritis.

He said it should take about 8 weeks to heal. Since the injury is already a week old, I can expect to be dealing with this for another 7 weeks.

That done, the only thing left was to get my mom to sign the medical transfer form, then we headed out. We ended up stopping for a very late lunch for her, trying a pizza place that caught her eye. Unfortunately, because she was so hungry, she was expecting to have fast-food speed at a sit down restaurant, and got pretty rude again. When the bill came, I paid for it at the table with my debit card. When she realized I’d paid for it, she got upset with me for leaving a tip. She has a real thing against tipping! *sigh* Thankfully, I managed to keep her from being rude directly to the waitress, at least.

The drive back to her place certainly had some… interesting… conversation, too.

I can’t see any of it was unusually difficult, but it certainly was psychologically exhausting. 😀

Meanwhile, I’d take the time to message my family to let them know about the toe, so when I finally got home, my older daughter was a sweetheart and taped my toes together for me.

But first, I got a picture of my toe sausage. They certainly hadn’t had any trouble seeing which toe was damaged!

I wish I’d thought to give the doctor my email address, so he could have sent me copies of the Xrays. 😀

So now I have a bit of a conundrum. I had a goal for cleaning and clearing the inner yard this year. I’m already completely behind, due to weather, but now that I know I’ve got weeks of healing ahead of me, I’m going to have to avoid doing stuff that will exacerbate the injury.

It looks like this summer is going to be pretty much a write off.

I’m hoping to be able to clear at least the area where the wood pile used to be. I know know that the big black plastic sheet that is draped over what seems to be a fence made of pallets was used for. It was a cover for the wood pile, to keep the snow off. I don’t know what it’s original purpose was, but what I can see of it seems to be in good shape, so I’m hoping we can use it to cover the area in the garden we mulched with straw, for next year. This will help kill off what’s growing through the straw.

I’m thinking it’s a small enough area to be a reasonable goal, plus it’ll be nice to get that mess cleaned up. We should even be able to move the other old dog house that’s there to a better, more sheltered, position for the cats to use it.

Our second year here is turning out not at all to plan.

Ah, well. We’ll adjust.

I will just have to make sure I don’t break any more bones!

The Re-Farmer