The Dangers of Frozen Vegetables

I was doing the good wife/mom thing yesterday afternoon and cooking up some dinner. Supper, if you're from IN, I suppose, which I am...and I do call it supper sometimes, but it confuses my husband who is not originally from IN. Regardless, I was whipping up a meatloaf and decided I better get a package of frozen corn out of the freezer.

We freeze corn from the garden each year, so when that quart ziploc bag is full, it's full. And it's heavy. And when it falls several feet, it can be deadly.

Two bags were fused together, so I held them just below my chin and attempted to pry them apart. Okay, so probably the smartest move wasn't drying my hands well after washing them. When the bags broke free, they slipped out of my hands, and one of them hit my left shin. Boy, howdy, did that smart. But that wasn't the worst of it.

The other bag landed on the top of my right foot. So yes, not only did I try to mangle, multilate and spindle one leg, but I managed to do damage to both. It's a talent, I say. It hit hard enough I actually bled.

I didn't realize I was bleeding until after I finished seeing stars. I finally understood what that kind of pain was.

When I was pregnant with our oldest son in AZ, I saw a dr. named Duck Kwan Oh. I kid you not. I couldn't even make it up that my baby dr. was named Duck. Actually, he went by the name Richard Oh. That's not quite as interesting in the telling, however. He did give us a bib for the baby that said, "I was delivered by Dr. Duck Kwan Oh."

Back to seeing stars. I asked Dr. Duck one day, "When do I go to the hospital?"

I'd read plenty about contractions, timing them, and that different drs. had different ideas of when you should arrive at the hospital. I think my pregnancy bible, What to Expect When You're Expecting, recommended arriving when the contractions were five minutes apart.

"When you see stars," he told me.

I think maybe he was trying to be funny. I was not amused, however. I was pregnant. I was 1800 miles away from home. It was my first baby, and did I forget to mention that Operation Desert Storm was in full swing? My husband told me that he could be deployed at any time. He could get up one morning, go to work, and not show up back home. If I were lucky, the Army might give me a call to let me know that my husband had been sent off to Saudi.

Needless to say, what should have been one of the happiest times of my life was peppered with a lot of mixed feelings and emotions. I wasn't in the mood for Dr. Duck and his stand-up routine.

"Pardon me?" I asked. I asked him that a lot, as he spoke with a really heavy Korean accent. I didn't pick him as a dr. He was assigned to me by the Army. I couldn't understand half of what the man told me.

"Come to hospital when you see stars," he told me.

I asked him once about the RH factor and why I needed a Rhogam shot. I'd read everything I could get my hands on. Every book in the library. I owned every book the bookstore carried about birthing babies. I wanted it explained to me, in plain English, because my pregnancy bible only had a paragraph about the RH factor.

"You must get the shot or baby die."

Well, that was a helpful answer. I went home and bawled my freakin' eyes out. When my husband got home and saw the tears, he got on the phone and asked Dr. Duck what the hell was going on because I was crying so hard I couldn't explain.

I never did see stars, and I played it safe going when my contractions were five minutes apart. After our boy was born, Dr. Duck held up the placenta and asked, "Anyone want hamburger?"

I looked at him and said, "I don't eat red meat." My husband laughed. My husband thought he was hilarious.

But yesterday, I did see those stars. Wow, that hurt like a son of a gun. I really thought I'd broken my foot. It hurt so bad that I didn't even cry.

My husband came home and took a look at my foot and reported that it was very bruised, but not swollen enough to be broken. He put some ice on it, gave me a percocet, and I have to say at that point, I didn't really care that it hurt.

Today, it's quite tender and my toes look like vienna sausages. (How's that for a visual?) And the best part is that my husband told me I should probably try to stay off of it, keep it elevated, and iced for a few days.

Did I just hear an excuse to sit around on my ass? Why yes, I do believe I did.