work hard, play hard, sleep hard

I (Marcia), your paparazzi “lens truth master” found Greg last week in Mexico. He tried going incognito with a fierce bandanna look but it flopped as he was a dead giveaway with book and pen in hand.

Our small group and extended clan (26 people) spent a week taking in the WARM sun and soft ocean breeze far AWAY from Minnesota and its harsh winter COLD. We have been taking vacations together for 10 years and each trip lets us escape from our everyday lives…except for Greg–his everyday life is ENHANCED on vacation. We have all come to know that Greg works hard and plays hard and sometimes we can’t tell which is which.

Greg at the beach…playing hard or working hard?But, when evening comes and we go dancing Greg puts down the book and pen and he plays harder than ANYONE…or is he working at it because he’s not reading and he has to have some interaction fun?

Greg and Shelley…singing and dancing hard

Greg loves 70s music and dancing. Didn’t he have that Tower of Power t-shirt on when he played in the NDY gig last month?

Then came the sleeping hard part…Shelley was busy packing the last night as Greg snored in the same room. He woke up and tried to get out of bed while still half-asleep, and the next second all he knew was that he was on the floor and in excruciating pain, his right baby toe was sticking out at a completely unnatural angle, and there was blood everywhere. His cries of pain woke up Alisha & Tim (their daughter and son-in-law), and Tim became the paparazzi for the night.

Jen is our go-to person for everything from upset stomachs to things like this, so it was Jen who got woken up to fix Greg’s toe in the middle of our last night in Mexico. How do you like the makeshift ER they put together? Nice lamps and towels! At least she’s wearing gloves!! I’ll let Jen take over to tell the rest of the story.

(consider this your fair warning that some pretty gross pictures are coming up!)

I found Greg lying in bed, moaning in pain, with a seriously deformed bloody toe (it kinda looked like it was ready to fall off). It’s definitely one of the grosser things I’ve ever seen.

I’m a pediatrician but I see this kind of stuff in kids all the time, so it was no big deal to fix it up. And whenever I’m traveling with a big group of people I bring supplies with me so I can take care of things like this, so I had almost everything I needed, and Alisha and Shelley tracked down everything else I didn’t have.

I have to say–I’m super impressed with how badly Greg messed up his toe without even knowing how he managed to do it–that takes skill. I’m guessing he stepped on glass (we found that piece in the above picture on the floor) which cut the toe, then caused him
to freak out and step wrongly on the toe…and the end result is that he had a big, deep laceration between his toes and a dislocated toe. I also thought he might have broken his toe too.

Talk about a not-fun place to have to place stitches. It’s actually kind of good that the toe was dislocated, because it made it a little easier to stitch up the cut.

Seven stitches later the cut actually looked pretty good and Greg’s toe no longer looked like it was going to fall off, but it still looked completely deformed.

I carefully started to push the toe back where it was supposed to be…and it popped right back into place. Shelley and Tim even heard it pop back in. Lovely.

By now it was almost 4 AM…so much for getting that nice long sleep! Greg you owe me!!! ;)

(For all you medical people out there, I understand that you might think that using a hotel room as an ER in the middle of the night in Mexico is a little stupid, so here’s my disclaimers–I put Greg on prophylactic antibiotics in case he had an open fracture, and I made Greg go to the ER once he got back to Minnesota to make sure there wasn’t any glass in the cut and to see if the toe was fractured. He went yesterday and there’s no glass in the cut. I guess there’s a little bone chip that might be a small fracture, which is no big deal).

2 pictures up: stitches done but still dislocated
Above picture: everything back in place!