I’ve told about everything that has ever happened in my life. Almost. Every near miss and a few direct hits.

Miraculously I’ve never had a broken bone. In my story about going for the Army draft physical I told about crushing my foot. There were no bone fractures. The bones had what Dr. Allen called radial cracks, I think. There were bones that had longitudinal cracks but nothing fractured, if that makes sense. He bandaged my foot but no cast. That was when I was 18 or 19.

Then when I was in my 30s I started having a pain in my left foot. I went to a podiatrist. When he did X-rays there several bones that had the same longitudinal cracking in them. I’m not sure if it was the same bones that never healed, but it seems likely they were.

He put my foot in a cast. It wasn’t a plaster cast like I had anyways seen. Instead it was fiberglas. I was familiar with the plaster casts because Kenny had several broken bones when we were kids. I remember him whining about how much it itched down inside the cast.

I saw what he had complained about within minutes of leaving the doctors office. The itching was driving me insane.

I went home and decided to cut the cast off of my foot. Before I was finally able to free myself from the bondage of that cast, I had broken every knife and every pair of scissors in the house.

Madeline was not happy with me for breaking all the cutlery and for not following the doctors orders. She thought it was the craziest thing anyone could do to start cutting a cast off within minutes of getting it put on. But I could tell that she had never worn a cast.

When the doctors office kept calling because I never went back to get the cast taken off I didn’t know what to tell them, so I kept ignoring the calls. One day when they called, I answered. I told them I was sorry to inform them that their patient was my dad and had been killed in a car wreck and I thought they buried him with the cast on.

We never heard another word from the foot doctor.