The airports have screwed me once again!
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| I may appear calm but I had a blue streak of swear words coming out of my mouth this morning |
I got up at the crack of dawn this morning to pack (because naturally, I fell asleep on the floor last night) and had my parents drop me off at DIA around 10:30. I checked my luggage, made it through security, and got to my gate with plenty of time to spare…..only to discovered that icy rain had completely CLOSED DOWN THE SALT LAKE CITY AIRPORT. No bueno, my friends. No bueno.
After a lot of discussion, it was made clear that the airport was closed until 5pm and that all flights out afterwards were full unless I wanted to hang out and hope for standby. I had already been at DIA for 3.5 hours at this point, so there was no way in hell that I was going to add to that time. Pretty sure I’ve already spent enough time in various airports this week! Luckily, my parents were able to come pick me up, so I cancelled my Southwest flight, purchased a new one-way ticket on Frontier tomorrow morning, and met them out front.
What a letdown of a day!
However, in some (very) small way, I am glad that it happened. I am having a rough comedown from my Haiti trip (more on that next week!) and I may have needed this breathing time. Additionally, it gave me a few extra hours to run to an Urgent Care Clinic to get this mess looked at!
Y’all, my foot isn’t usually a deep shade of maroon-purple, nor is it typically swollen up like a stuffed sausage. However, it does experience all these side effects when I step on a massive sea urchin in the middle of the ocean!
After Haiti, we spent two nights in the Dominican Republic, enjoying the beaches and the nearby hiking. However, I managed to step on the porcupine of the sea within 20 minutes after entering the water! The quills got buried pretty deeply and unfortunately, I had an awful reaction. Since I didn’t feel like letting a doctor in the DR dig around in my foot with a needle, I chose to take 50 mg of Benadryl and suck it up until I got back into the States. The only problem was that I’m not big on meds or pills and very rarely (if ever) take them. I don’t even have Ibuprofen in my house! This was the first time I had ever taken Benadryl and I was not quite expecting how it made me feel….
…but I’m pretty sure Angel gave me acid instead! (Not really, but I imagine that this is what an acid trip is like!) I had to stay awake because it was the medal presentations for the marathon, but I was so out of it! Angel told me I was slurring my words (awesome), and I was convinced that I saw a few elves hiding in the bushes. In case you’re wondering, there are definitely no garden gnomes in the DR! I was sitting on the edge of the bench, terrified to say anything for fear of slurring my words in front of everyone, and almost fell off the damn bench. I even had day terrors that I would slide down the bench and smack my head on the railing!
Y’all, Benadryl is not cool! Luckily, it did take the swelling down, but hell if I’ll ever take those pills again!
Anyway, after my flight was cancelled today, my dad issued me an ultimatum: if I didn’t go get my foot looked at, he wouldn’t take me to the airport tomorrow. My family is nothing if not sneaky! I didn’t think it was necessary because all the swelling was gone, but the quills were still buried in there and it was sore, so I agreed.
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| There are 5 quills broken off in there so deep that they only look like pin pricks! |
The doc agreed with my dad and said they needed to come out for fear of infection, so I spent 1.5 hours laying on my stomach today while the doc used some sharp-ass tweezers and a freaking scalpel to dissect my foot. The scalpel was necessary because the quills were buried beneath my fantastic foot calluses, so he had to cut through the tough skin in order to find the quill. Super hot, right? The good part is that the quills are removed; the bad part is that I now have five gaping holes in the bottom of my foot. Tradeoffs, right?!