and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

So my foot is practically as good as new. Surprisingly, despite the "deep cut", or "puncture wound", or "laceration", depending on which medical professional you talk to, I was able to walk fairly comfortably on it from the get-go. In the Jamaican airport, it was sort of uncomfortable in a squishy-skin-tearing sort of way, but not hurty by any means. To look at it you'd think you were staring at a sausage in a frying pan with it's side split open, hammy bits poking out like kids crowded in the back window of a station wagon. Wide-eyed with delight. Only these weren't kids, they were meaty chunks from my arch having a party with some sort of infectious bacteria. Later, back at home the next day, I went to work as usual and hobbled around - mostly because I didn't want to walk on it so it had time to heal.

By the next day, however, things were looking pretty sad, what with all the skin around the star wound having completely turned white, the hammy bits hanging out of the star having become more like slimy-rotting-flesh bits, and oodles of bacterial waste in the form of puss. The area surrounding the wound for two inches or so was red and tender to the touch.

I'm not one to be a hypocondriac but nevertheless I had visions of pale gangreneous feet being chopped off with hack saws and bad civil-war movie re-runs.

So, finally, I sucked it up and went to the pseudo-emergency room. Well, actually, I went to the dentist. Then I went to the pseudo-emergency room. No stiching, of course, since it had already been 48 hours at this point, but I did receive a juicy antibiotic cocktail in my ass and a tetanus shot. They insisted on an xray to check for any bits or pieces of broken seashell lodged inside the wound. My wallet cringed. The words "open the wound" and "lance" were whispered close to my vicinity. I cringed. Luckily, nothing definitive showed up in the images. Within about 4 hours the swelling around the wound had receeded by half, the white skin around the wound had turned back to a nice fleshy pink, and my hammy bits had started to climb back into the wound. Talk about modern medicine.. they might not be able to cure cancer but shit, can they kill a bacterial infection. I almost felt bad for the little guys.

A week and a half later and the wound has been reduced to a funky-looking mound of tough tissue - it's still clearly a wound, but it is sealed up on itself and the three-pointed star is now on it's way to becoming a nice lumpy scar of sorts. This will go well with the tiny bit of lumpy tissue still remaining over my left eye from my halloween stair-diving and the lumpy tissue on the bottom of my chin from my drunken valentine's day marathon.