This Little Piggy Cried “Wee, wee, wee.”

In a crowd of 10 people, you’ll undoubtedly discover that one of them will eventually get into big trouble, repeatedly… over and over… recidivism at its best. And there’s no stopping him from the kind of trouble that gives the other nine a bad name.

It seems that every six months or so, I stub the littlest toe on my left foot, the smallest and mostly useless appendage on my whole body, the one that, in spite of appearance, all of us could likely do without. At least the others would have more room to spread out in my shoes and I would no longer inadvertently kick the furniture with it.

One kick, sometimes on a toy in the middle of the night, once on the leg of the couch, a couple of times on the chair in my office, but it is always that one toe on that foot, never the other ones on the other foot. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe I always find myself to the right of the dangerous furniture in my house or that particular toe sticks out farther than the others, like it has a peculiar death with. Maybe it is suicidal, shunned from the rest of the group, a loner, dark, miserable, alone and depressed. Who wants to be the little toe, the one that is so ineffective, what with that minuscule nail, no discernable joint to speak of and just try to move it independently from the others. It’s futile.

The last time I kicked it, the toe chose to go up against the leg of the kitchen table, and when it made contact, it felt as though the leg of the table separated the little toe from the rest and buried itself at the base of the void. It brought tears to my eyes, and it was a pain I was lucky enough to revisit with every step for about two months. I asked Dr. Rico about it, and he told me exactly what I expected: going to see a doctor about it would be a waste of time because they would merely tape that little toe to the toe next to it. That probably wouldn’t solve anything and it would be waste of money for a piece of tape.

So, I lived with it, and after about two months, it slowly stopped hurting. A few weeks after that, I didn’t think about it whenever I took a step and my guard was quietly relaxed until I unsuspectingly made myself—and my toe—vulnerable again.

That was about a month ago and unseen forces of nature, ergonomics of the furniture and the feng shui of the interior design of my house led to the perfect storm of toe stubbing, the vortex of which focused itself directly onto my little toe.

The first time was this morning when I walked into the bathroom downstairs and I didn’t bother to turn on the first light so I walked through half of the bathroom in the dark. Along the way, my toe slammed into a small wooden stool that the kids stand on to wash their hands. I experienced a pain that bolted up the outside of my leg and halted somewhere just south of my knee cap. After dancing around for a while in the darkened bathroom, doing my best to stifle a long string of cuss words, I reached down very much expecting to feel the littlest toe on my left foot to be either completely missing and somewhere squirming like a fish on the carpet or facing south on a north going foot. Luckily, all five soldiers were still in formation, albeit one was pulsing like a cartoon hand after getting smashed in a piano lid.

I recovered, tread a little lighter and made sure that I navigated the house with care. My care was of little use. Two or three hours and two glasses of Pepsi later, I found myself with the urge to visit the bathroom, but it isn’t as if I didn’t remember what had happened the last time I went in there without turning on the light. My toe was still reeling from the last experience, and I was determined not to repeat it, so I turned on the light. I’m not sure what really happened, perhaps the stool was moved closer to the door since my last visit, but as I reached out to flick on the light switch, I had to take a step into the room. Taking that one step was all it took, mid-step collision repeat the previous agony. How is it possible to stub the same toe on the same piece of furniture in the same manner on the same day?

Though my toe was still very sore from the earlier smash, the second stubbing didn’t hurt as bad. Maybe my toe was numbed or swollen and insulated from the stool. However, a few minutes later, after I stopped my second dance of the morning, the pain seeped back into my foot and it really felt as though I broke it.

The rest of the morning, I walked on the inside of my foot. Any pressure on that toe was uncomfortable, and if I accidentally touched it or the toe pressed up against the inside of my shoe (when I went to pick up Natalie from school), it stung like someone was pounded a nail into the base of my toe.

For certain, this time it is broken. It hurts to bend it and it hurts to touch it, and Heaven forbid if I hit it again.

Well… apparently life is organized in threes. After Matthew went down for his afternoon nap, Natalie and I were hanging out downstairs for a while, until she wanted to go up to the office and play some games on the computer. I was headed that way too, so I offered her a ride. Excitedly, she hopped up on my back, I stood up and took a big step forward. In mid-swing of my left foot, it stopped violently against the leg of the ottoman, this time taking two toes with it, the littlest one and the one next to it.

So, I not only danced around the room, but I had Natalie still on my back for the ride, to which she found thrilling, like a bucking bronco. I threw her before the seven seconds were up and I examined the poor appendages for any permanent damage. Lucky for the already-broken little toe, the one next to it (the ring toe?) took the brunt of the accident.

Now, I can’t even so much as think about my little toe without it hurting, and you never know how much you use any one part of your body until you hurt it. How many times have you reopened a paper cut on something because you forgot about the cut? How many times have you rebruised a bruise because you keep hitting the same spot on the same thing?

How many times must I reinjure the same toe in the same way?