No Witnesses

Yesterday afternoon I took two of our dogs (Miki and Lea) for a walk. I had both of them on six foot (2 meter) leashes, and as we left the house they were excited and playful. They lunged at each other, grabbed each other’s leashes, and generally just were having a wonderfully doggy time. The three of us have done this hundreds of times before.

But yesterday afternoon the random course of this playful behavior took a slightly different twist. The two dogs, for just a moment, were running around me in opposite directions. The result of this was that their leashes wrapped around my ankles. They managed somehow to do this when (a) I was in mid-step, with one foot in the air, (b) my two ankles were right next to each other, and (c) I was on the pavement of our driveway. As much as I wanted to repeal the laws of physics at that moment, I of course could not. The inertia of my forward walking motion carried my body forward, while my two feet were quite effectively tied together. In a very ignomious fashion I flopped forward, right on my face. Naturally I threw my hands out to break my fall (that pavement was coming up toward me at an alarming rate!), but that wasn’t quite enough to keep my face from slamming into the pavement. I ended up with a painful scrape on one palm, a lesser scrape on the other, and a very unlikely-looking set of wounds on my face. Right below my nose there’s a gouge, and on the inside of my mouth a matching one. There was a stick on the pavement right where my face struck, and that stick got me just under the nose.

As I lay there trying to absorb what had just happened, the dogs — frightened, I think, by my unusual “behavior” — were tugging hard on their leashes. This, of course, kept my ankles tightly bound. So there I was, hurting, bleeding all over the place, and unable for a couple of minutes to disentangle myself. It really wasn’t much fun, I have to say. And it was even worse when I first got back inside and looked in a mirror — the amount of blood was worrisome. But the bleeding soon subsided to a minor gusher, and after some thorough scrubbing, disinfecting, and bandaging I realized that the damage was nowhere near as bad as first appearances. The worst part, really, was that my upper lip and nose was all swelled up (it’s considerably better already this morning).

I was glad Debbie wasn’t home to see this. She’s up in Long Beach, at the National Invitational with Mo’i, and is enjoying herself greatly. By the time she gets home on Sunday, I suspect the swelling will have largely gone away, and the healing will be underway…

This is the first time I’ve ever managed to hurt myself walking the dogs!