Fractured Finger Friday - Poking Fun

Although my unfortunate injury, subsequent surgery, and long-term recovery have caused a slowdown of blogging, thus plunging you long distance blog monkeys into painful Todd-withdrawal, for those who are in more immediate contact with me my pain and misery have provided endless hours of amusement.

• After my finger was put into a splint to keep the bone from dislocating any more, I was constantly being chastised by Cap’n Peanut, who maintained that as a Sunday School teacher I shouldn’t be flipping people off.
  
  
• Remember how I said that some of the girls had offered to fix me dinner? I should have known there’d be a catch, but I don’t think I would have ever in a million years guessed exactly what that catch would be: my dinner was a meatloaf* in the shape of a finger, complete with crumbled cracker fingernail, aluminum foil stitches, needle and thread, and, the pièce de résistance, red and blue Twizzler veins emerging from a hole at the end. As soon as Cap’n Cluck sends me the pictures she took I’ll be sure to post them.
  
  
• Following my surgery, I had to keep my hand constantly elevated to avoid swelling. That first night as I sat at my computer, arm resting on top of my head, PigPen walked by, stopped, and said “Yes, Todd, you have a question?” He would not be the only one to use this gag; in fact, a week later I would be called on in a meeting at work for the same reason.
  
  
• When it came time to choose a color for my hard cast, I was true to my word to fellow OSU fan PigPen and selected orange. Over the next few days, my friends were glad to inform me of everything my brightly colored burden qualified me for: going hunting without a vest, guiding traffic, guiding airplanes, working in a construction zone, etc. I have also been informed multiple times by co-workers how much it clashes with my work clothes, and every third person to see me asks if it glows in the dark.
  
  
• For reasons I shan’t get into here, last Saturday night I was doing the chicken dance; when it came time to clap my hands, I instead slapped my good hand against my chest which, for some reason, struck PigPen as the funniest thing he’d seen all day, requiring him to then do his impression of me several times at church and lunch the next day.
  
  
• The other day at work one of the student workers walked up, placed his plastic Captain Hook prosthetic on top of the cast, and walked off.
  
  
• Most people are incredulous when they find out that my horribly large and bulky cast is because of a single broken finger, but Zinger’s line is my favorite response so far: “if you’d broken a bone any further down, they probably would have put you in traction.”
  
  
• At the end of church services each week, we are asked to stand and join hands with the person next to us as we sing the closing hymn. This week, Cap’n Shack-Fu was on my right, causing him to exclaim “Great, why do I get the gimp hand?” He then proceeded to grasp me by the thumb.
  
  
• Kookamama’s response to hearing I broke my middle finger: “What, were you flipping too many people off?” Surprisingly, so far she’s the only one to make this particular comment.
  
  
• While my new Orange Power cast leaves my thumb and index finger free, allowing me greater gripping capabilities than the previous arrangement which blocked the index finger off, the bulkiness of the cast still makes certain activities problematic, such as tying my shoes. During my first horribly frustrating attempt to do so, PigPen came to my rescue – of course, as soon as he was done he patted me on the head and started talking to me in the same tone of voice he uses when he talks to his nephews on the phone. “There you go, got your big boy shoes all tied. Who wants a popsicle? Who wants a popsicle?”
  
  There were, of course, no popsicles.
  
  
• While hanging out at Shack-Fu’s house the other night, I had some difficulty getting his recliner to recline, since the lever was on the right side. After helping me with that, my good pal decided to treat me like an invalid, shoving food in my mouth while I was talking to PigPen on the phone**, maniacal and mischievous grin plastered across his sleep-deprived face the whole time***
  
  

Of course, there are numerous examples of times when people ask me if I want to go do something I can’t (“Want to go swimming? Go bowling? Play disc golf”?) or merely laugh heartily at my one handed fumblings (trying to open bottles, trying to sign name, trying to eat, etc.), all of which prompted Cap’n Cluck to thank me heartily on Sunday for breaking my finger and undergoing surgery just to provide them all with ample entertainment.

*When PigPen asked if he could take some with him to work for lunch, I was torn. On the one hand, without him, I wouldn’t have been receiving a home cooked meal from Angel, Cluckity, and others. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure I wanted to support the “if I break one of Todd’s bones I get free food” idea that was sure to result.
**Upon being told that Shack was force feeding me, PigPen began to yell through the phone “Feed him Dr. Pepper! Make him drink Dr. Pepper!” He’s one sick individual, that PigPen.
***The details of why Shack-Fu was back in town and sleep deprived will have to wait until some other time, but suffice it to say that he is beginning to suspect that FEMA is actually just a huge conspiracy calculated to drive him over the edge.