February 14th, 2010 by Sherry

I’m throwing myself a pity party, and you’re all invited.
This weekend has kind of sucked ass. This is unfortunate because it’s a Holiday weekend, and I was so looking forward to it.
Friday there was a funeral. Saturday morning we went to a rather grueling family therapy session, and Saturday night I decided it might be fun to smash my left cheekbone and teeth off my concrete front porch.
I could handle the funeral. I could handle the therapy session, with a few days to recover in my mind. The cheekbone smash? Not so much.
So I decided to turn to my old friend, my blog of happy place, to try and get out some of this self loathing that is making me contemplate cancelling my Valentine’s dinner at my favourite restaurant, with my favourite man, in exchange for sitting around feeling sorry for myself and continually looking in the mirror to see how much uglier I’ve become since the last time.
Brad and I were watching The Lost World: Jurassic Park, having an awesome couch cuddly Saturday afternoon with the puppies. A commercial came on, so I decided to take the dogs out for a pee break. When I opened the door, Peas almost got pierced by an icicle that had broken away from the eavestroph so I thought I’d knock them all down before they landed in someone’s brain. (do you remember that episode of Grey’s Anatomy where Christina got stabbed with an icicle? See? could happen. anyway…..) I leaned too far off the doorstep and had to step down onto the porch so I wouldn’t fall flat on my face. Sure enough, I stepped down right on top of fresh ice, lost my footing and fell flat on my face.
I felt my left foot fly right out from underneath me, felt the wind get knocked out of me when my stomach hit first, and then heard a loud crack and felt a searing pain when my face bounced off the concrete porch. It was like it was all happening in segments, and I could consciously feel each and every one of them separately. Usually when you have a mishap everything happens so fast that it all seems like a weird blur, but not this one. And I can still hear that crack of my cheekbone against concrete. It’s still quite vivid in my memory.
I used every ounce of energy that I had to scream Brad’s name as loud as possible, knowing there was a good chance he wouldn’t hear me. Then I put my hand under my face, honestly thinking that I had to hold it there to keep my mouth shut and my teeth inside so I wouldn’t spit them out, and lie on the porch waiting.
I could sense JoJo freaking out and running back and forth on the porch. Peas snuggled up to the top of my head and wouldn’t leave me, even when Brad came and was yelling for him to go into the house so he could help me get up and see if I was okay.
Luckily all my teeth were intact but, man, did they freakin’ hurt. The entire left side of my face swelled like a prize fighter, and bright red concrete burn rose to the surface of my cheek and side of my nose. Brad brought me tylenol and and an ice bag, when I finally calmed down enough to sit still. Everything throbbed for a good two hours before it became bearable again.
This morning my face is still massive. The swelling has gone up into my eye and down into my jaw and neck. It feels like your face does when you’ve had novacaine at the dentist, except without the numbness. The concrete burn on my cheekbone and the side of my nose is still bright as a berry with a nice bluish crescent of bruising right underneath. The bruising should be just awesome in time to go back to work on Tuesday.
Maybe I’ll wear all black and dark black eyeliner, put makeup on the other side of my face and tell everyone that I’ve gone Goth.