It's just blood

I've been planning some kind of epic first post outlining my motivation for starting a blog in a feeble attempt to make it different from all other beginner running blogs. To emphasize how I went from non-runner to halfhearted runner to oh-my-gods-I-love-being-a runner and all the road dirt and trail mud caked to my legs is something I should be proud of.

I'm still somewhere between "this doesn't suck so much anymore" and "halfhearted."

But (there always is one), I don't think I'll be running for a few days now, so I may as well use Post One for lamentations on why I won't be logging miles.

Last night, I heard my cat scratching up my sofa. We have two cats, the Wants-To-Be-Good one who weighs nearly 20 pounds and thinks sitting on our faces and purring like an engine is what we want him to do, and the Generally-Evil-With-Sweet-Moments one, who waits until we're in bed to scratch on the couch because he knows we won't do anything about it. Just look at that face... pure evil! Since this happens every night, normally I roll over, put the pillow over my head and try to ignore it. It was a cheap World Market sofa, anyway.

This night, however, is different from most other nights in that I wasn't so comfortably settled into bed that I couldn't get up to do something about it. In fact, my partner and I were watching a pretty depressing documentary about mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia when all I selfishly wanted to do was finish reading my book.

My partner swears he was going to tell me not to do it, but I grabbed a pillow anyway and ran into the living room. Now, I'd never actually hit my cat (and admit to it publicly), but he has an irrational fear of pillows being swung through the air in his general direction, and my intention was to condition him against scratching the furniture. Scratch the furniture, crazy pillow-wielding ladies will come after you. Simple enough for a small cat-mind to comprehend, yes?

On my clumsy amble into the living room, I felt my pinky toe scratch against something. It hurt, but I was on a mission. Jack, the furniture-destroying cat, was already hiding under the coffee table. Somehow I found myself on the floor clutching my foot and screaming about how I'd removed my toenail. For whatever reason, we have a brick propping the bedroom door open, and I'd kicked that on my way out the door.

My partner grabbed our backpacking first-aid kit, ready to use the skills we developed when we took a Wilderness First Aid course. While he was rummaging around for it, I peeked under my hand and tried to make sense of where all the blood was coming from. My toenail was fine. What I had actually done was ripped the tip of my pinky toe off. Once I had finished screaming (I'm not very good at dealing with injuries) and the river of blood slowed to a trickle, we irrigated the wound, dabbed some triple antibiotic ointment around the toe, wrapped it in gauze and tape, and crossed our fingers that the skin would reattach in the morning.

So far, so good. This morning, without investigated too closely and disrupting the healing process--or throwing up--everything looks like it's stitching back together. Hopefully it will stop throbbing and I'll be back on the trail by Monday so I can use my new running toy!