A bad case of dumbass-itis

Oh, my. How stupid we (the royal we) can be sometimes. I was at my brother's house with my son on Monday night, and Alex (my six-year-old son) wanted to race, so I chugged along the sidewalk beside him, holding back but making him think I was really struggling to keep up. Well, my sister-in-law bellows out, "You run funny!" which lead to various degrees of good-humored insults flying back and forth, until finally my brother and I decided (because we're stupid) to have a footrace.

This wasn't a long dash, just two house lengths, with telephone poles to mark the starting and finishing lines. My sister-in-law suggests we run on the street instead of the sidewalk, which again, stupidly, we thought was fine. So we line up, she yells out the start, and we take off.

I used to be pretty fast when I was younger, but back surgery and a lack of running for many years has apparently slowed me the hell down. My brother's a year and a half younger than me and about sixty pounds heavier, so I thought I would kick his big bubble butt handily. Imagine my surprise when the big load pulls ahead! So of course I pour on a little more steam.

And proceed to trip.

I took about two ungainly steps trying madly to prevent the inevitable disaster before gravity took over plowed me into the black top. I landed on the heels of my palms, then quickly tucked and rolled, which may or may not prevent you from being blasted to atoms in case of a nuclear shock wave coming your way, but doesn't do a goddamned thing if you're falling in the middle of the street like a doofus.

I lost most of the skin on the heels of my palms, my left knee, and left elbow. I got up and saw a huge bloody flap of flesh hanging off of my palm and realized I had really fucked myself up. I hobbled inside and my brother and sister-in-law helped by pouring hydrogen peroxide all over my gushing wounds, then bandaged me up. My brother asked, "Can I laugh now?" and I said sure, because if he had fallen the same way I sure as hell would have laughed.

It's too bad no one was videotaping this, because as embarrassing as it was, I think I'd be a shoe-in for a prize for the dorkiest fall.

I'm healing nicely, but it's been a pretty pain-filled week.

(My brother works for Verizon and once was up on a pole and hit his thumb so hard with a hammer that he split the skin from the fleshy part all the way down to the firsts crease, and gave himself permanent nerve damage. If he hadn't been strapped to the pole he would have fallen thirty feet or so to his untimely death. I had to pick him up at the hospital and drive him home because his wife was unavailable and the doctor had given him too many drugs to allow him to drive. So I'm not the only klutz in the Forbes family treehouse.)