Besides the time I dislocated my nose and smashed my cheekbones while sled riding, the only other time I broke a bone was when I fractured my little toe while working at the Tranquil House Inn on Roanoke Island.
Spending the summers on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with sand between my toes and the salty ocean breeze blowing across my face while cruising along the beach road with water on both sides was the life.
Who was I kidding? I had to work for a living.
This particular morning I drove to work with my sister, who just happened to be working at the same bed and breakfast that summer. She was a housekeeper while I served as the resident house boy. Or as I liked to call it, a glorified gopher.
Before collecting the morning laundry, I rushed into the kitchen to load the dishwasher from those early risers who liked to wake up before the crack of dawn to get a head start on the day.
After loading up the trunk of my vehicle with all the used towels and dirty sheets from the day before, I headed over to the laundry facility a couple blocks away from the main building.
I no more got to the laundry room when my morning coffee kicked in. Funny thing was, I didn’t drink coffee. But you know what I mean.
For those of you who don’t understand what I’m talking about, I’ll spell it out for you.
I had to go to the bathroom really, really bad.
Funny thing was, the laundry facility didn’t come equipped with a restroom.
Not wanting to waste any time, I put the first load of laundry in the washers before heading back to the inn.
That was my first mistake.
By now, I was at the beginning stages of doing a little jig while desperately trying to keep from having a major mess on my hands.
If only I had five more seconds to spare, everything in my world would have been hunky-dory.
But I didn’t have the option of five more seconds. They came just a little bit too late.
You guessed it.
I got all the way back to the waterfront bed and breakfast and even made it into the restroom before I had another problem to deal with.
I was not a happy camper.
But I was not about to go all the way back home at the other end of the island just to change my clothes.
Since I was washing sheets and towels, I figured what would be the harm to throw in a pair of shorts and underwear.
If you think this was the end of the story, boy are you wrong. This is where it gets interesting.
After going back to the laundry facility, I proceeded to take my clothes off and threw them in the wash with everything else.
When I removed my clothes, I also took off my shoes. Although the floor was kind of dirty, I didn’t see the necessity of putting them back on.
That was my second mistake.
So I continued about my business of doing the inn’s laundry while wrapped in a bath towel.
While crossing the floor to put a load of sheets in one of the over-sized dryers, my foot caught the corner of one of the full laundry bags still sitting in the center of the room.
Somehow or other my little toe got stuck in an empty gap of the rather large bag which sent me flying.
When the world stopped spinning, I was lying sprawled out across the floor buck naked after the towel had fallen from my limber body.
I was so used to falling, that I had learned to fall without doing much damage to my body. So I didn’t think I had hurt myself until I looked down at my feet.
My right baby toe was sticking straight out to the right. My little toe and the one next to it kind of looked like an “L” shape. That’s when I knew I had a problem.
I’m the kind of person that doesn’t feel pain until I actually see the blood. In this case, it was a broken toe.
Sure enough, my prognosis was correct. My poor little toe was in fact broken.
I was panic-stricken.
Here I was, all by myself at the laundry facility with a broken toe and my clothes in the wash. What was I to do?
Well, I sure didn’t want my toe to stay that way. I would need to have all my shoes specially made.
So, I did the only logical thing at the time. I reached down and moved my toe back to the position where I thought it should be.
I don’t know how smart that was because my whole body began to convulse with pain and I thought I was going to lose my breakfast.
Now that my toe was fixed, I still had a slight problem. You guessed it. My clothes were on the spin cycle in the washer.
Before going back to the main building to tell my boss the whole sorted story, I had to wait until I finished washing my clothes.
Well, when I got back to the bed and breakfast, I didn’t quite tell her every detail because she never would have believed it anyway.
The thing my boss couldn’t figure out was why I had my shoes off in the first place.
If she only knew.