Two steps forward, one step ow
A couple years ago, the night before Labor Day (the US one, in September), I was up late after an online RPG session and was getting ice from the freezer to refill my drink. I opened the freezer door, took a step back to accommodate it, stepped wrong on my left foot, heard a crack, and found myself on the floor with my ankle at an odd angle.
"Well," I said to myself, "my mom always said that if I wasn't involuntarily crying from the pain, it wasn't broken." So I got up and tried to put weight on it. NOPE, it said, and I went down again. After a couple phone calls, I finally called an ambulance, and hauled myself up into my desk chair to wait for them. (They had a cool chair thing that goes up and down stairs, but I had to get to it because my porch at the time was full of dialysis supplies – because a few months earlier I'd found out I was in terminal kidney failure. Best summer of my life!)
When they helped me out to the chair and I accidentally lost my balance and set my weight down on the bad ankle – that was the worst pain I've ever felt, bar none. Nothing's ever even come close, not even the pain of breaking the leg. And it was broken - in three places. All from stepping funny while I was opening the fridge.
These days my ankle is mostly better. It only hurts when I put too much strain on it, or when I don't move it around enough during the day, or when I slept slightly funny, or when it gets cold – well, you know the drill. I finally got a primary care doctor again this summer, and in January I finally have an appointment with an orthopedist to take another look at it; my PCP had an X-ray done and it showed a cyst on the bone where the hardware had caused irritation, so they may have to do additional surgery. It's a whole thing.
Until then I tried to get a 60-day handicap card for my car, because some days it's fine, but some days I'm walking on knives on that side. My PCP can't give me one; once they've given a referral they're not allowed to give out handicap cards. And the orthopedist can't give me one; they're not allowed to give cards out to patients they haven't seen yet.
So I guess I'm walking on knives this winter.