Goose egg
You know in those cartoons where someone gets hit on the head and a giant “goose egg” swells up from the point of contact? I always thought those were gross exaggerations. And, whenever I’ve heard someone recount an experience of his/her own with a goose egg, I have thought, “yeah right”.
I’m here to tell you that those cartoons are no exaggeration! I had one heck of a goose egg yesterday!
I sort of fell. Actually, I very much fell. I had just purchased eight steamed dumplings, grilled on one side, from a bustling food street tucked back off of Nanjing Lu and was walking through the scorching heat to my home to meet Annaick, her sister and her sister’s boyfriend who all arrived in Shanghai yesterday at 2pm. I had made it through a less-crowded street of vendors selling ponytail holders and CDs of techno-fied Britney Spears and was coming up to the crosswalk for Nanjing Lu. The sun had worked its magic and my face was wet with moving beads of sweat. My shirt was sticking to me, my phone was vibrating from the recesses of my bag and the container of dumplings was burning my left hand off. Not paying attention, I walked toward the crosswalk and missed a step. There are a lot of unnecessary steps around Shanghai. You walk up three steps to walk down four to then walk up two all the time and for no reason. No reason that I can see, of course. There is an order to the chaos, I’m sure; it just isn’t visible to the naked, foreigner eye.
So I fell and landed on my right kneecap. Seriously. All the while, I’m trying to save the damn DUMPLINGS, so I didn’t save myself. My kneecap made a very strange sound (no, not a breaking sound, but creepy enough to induce the urge to vomit on the spot). And to try and save my knee, my left thigh muscle tried to pick my body up off the ground, thus spraining itself a little bit.
I’m fine. All is well. I ended up laughing uncontrollably because I was more worried about those dumplings than my knee. I picked myself up, crossed the street and walked along slowly trying to process the strange sensation in my right knee. After a while, I thought maybe it was bleeding, so I stopped and looked down to see the biggest round orb right on top of the spot where my normal knee used to be. It was a liquid-filled goose egg and it was huge. I started laughing and then thought I was going to vomit for real so I stopped looking at the knee. But, I was drawn back, and started looking at my knee’s profile in store windows as I passed. I’ve never seen anything look so ridiculous…and it hurt like hell! I limped the twenty blocks home with the dumplings leaving a red burn mark on my left hand and as soon as I got home, I pulled some frozen dumplings out of the freezer and “iced” my knee.
The swelling went down in a couple of hours and today; there is a colorful bruise in the place of the goose egg.
