Broken toe? Turns out, no.

Thanks to all those who commented, either below or by e-mail, about my daughter's injured toe. It was looking worse today -- bruise wrapped around the toe and spreading a little onto the foot -- and so my daughter and I finally decided to make the trip to the ER, if only so we could stop worrying about it. The nurse who looked at the toe thought it was broken, the medical student who looked at the toe thought it was broken, the attending physician who looked at the toe thought it was fractured, but the X-ray showed nothing. So after two hours and 40 minutes, we were basically told that she should just keep doing what she's been doing and if it still hurts in four weeks, call our pediatrician. But we did get a note to get her out of gym for a week, and that's something. (Of course, Miss Conscientious already made up her missed Tuesday gym lesson after school today, right after today's gym lesson, which probably explains why the toe was throbbing when she got home.)

My daughter and I agreed that, surprisingly, our time in the ER was not nearly as excruciating as we'd expected -- even, in a way, a little fun, as a sort of adventure. Two hours and 40 minutes represents a lot of waiting, but it was broken up into so many waiting bits that the time seemed to move along. There was the wait to check in, the wait to see a nurse, the wait to go to an ER room, the wait to present my insurance card which was broken up by my daughter getting called to an ER room, the wait for the med student, the wait for the doctor, the wait for the X-ray, the wait to make sure the X-ray really took, the wait to be told what the X-ray said, the wait to charge our co-pay, and the wait to get a receipt. Divide that many waits into 160 minutes, and no one of them was intolerable. My daughter got her first ride in a wheeled bed; I had my first experience of being sent out of the room so a doctor could ask my teen girl if she was having sex; and we got medical comfirmation for my theory that the young lady's recent bout of dizziness was related not to her toe injury but to the fact that she ate eight miniature KitKat bars in a row, sending her pancreas into insulin overdrive. Not such a bad way to spend an afternoon, really. And it's nice not to have to worry about that poor bruised little piggy anymore.