Accident Prone doesn't even begin to cover it...

I don’t think in any of the posts that I made about myself that I shared the most fundamental aspects of who I am. I am a magnet for accidents. You know when they make new products they have people who test them to see if they can be hurt on them and they pass and then a few months later some schumck gets hurt on it and there is some mass recall? You can bet that 9 out of 10 times, that schmuck was me. If it is even remotely possible to be hurt on something, I can do it.

There are products that are made to help keep people safe. Take for example those rubber texturized mats that are made to go on the bottom of bath tubs and showers.

Those are there to help prevent people from slipping and falling. I used to slip and slid all of the time in my bath tub so I invested in a huge bath mat that covered the entire bottom. There was no way I was going to slip in the tub anymore. WRONG. Not a week after purchasing the mat I was taking a shower and went to turn around and then all of the sudden I was on my back on the floor of the tub and my left elbow felt like it had EXPLODED. I knew as soon as I hit the tub that I had broken my arm. I fell on a no slip shower mat and broke my arm. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? The pain was at least a 11 on the pain scale. 

Unfortunately for me, it was a Sunday night. Not only a Sunday night, but a Sunday night on a holiday weekend and I just happened to work for a company that had a policy that you had to work a full 8 hours before the holiday and a full 8 hour after the holiday weekend in order to receive the holiday pay. Doubly unfortunate was that it was the Thanksgiving holiday and I would have lost pay for Thanksgiving day and the day after as the company was going to pay us for both days. If I went to the doctor, they would have made me miss the following day and even if they didn’t, the cast would have made my boss send me packing. Not to mention that my boss would have been pissed if I called in for a broken arm. She did not like it when someone was gone from work regardless of the reason. So, I made the decision to just suck it up and go to work. 

Let me just tell you that if you work a job that uses your hands and your arms exclusively and the job CANNOT be performed in any way without the full use and range of your arms, do not try to suck it up and go to work. The pain was unbelievable. As soon as I finished my 8 hour shift, I drove myself to the doctor and got my arm put in a cast. To add insult to injury in the most literal sense, my doctor did not believe me when I told him that I slipped and fell on a no slip shower pad and he brought his female nurse in to confront me in a domestic violence intervention. The humiliation was priceless, but that was nothing compared to the orange beam incident. Perhaps I will share that story tomorrow.