Confession Friday: I sprained my knee…slipping on a strawberry.

“A what?!” You may be asking yourself…and yes, I said a strawberry.

If you aren’t caught up on the fact that this is part 3 of a series of blog posts, you can read the first two, about my skiing injury and then my epic battle with an icy alley.

Now that you can see what you’re dealing with here (you know, the biggest klutz in the history of ever…), let’s move on, shall we?

So I was finally out of physical therapy for the second time…thank God for Bradley and their fancy pants PT department because we had no insurance…and I was walking a little bit better. My physical therapist friend who was a physical therapy major was making me do regular exercises to regain mobility (Sit on the ground with your legs straight out. See how they both look normal? Now pop one knee up about 4-5 inches… And imagine that you have a hyper-extended other knee…because I have hyper-extended joints… That’s what my knee looked like. It would not straighten out completely. And it still hurts a little bit to this day Oh, hey! We’re still inside a parenthetical statement. Sorry about that…)

So I was doing everything she told me. Even though it was essentially healing really well, I still iced it…and used elevators…and was late to math class (okay, I was late to all classes, but math was the best. Math 101: the only math class I took at Bradley. Math 101: in which I hobbled in late on crutches every day. Math 101: in which I walked over to the far side of the room after class started, pulled out the left-handed desk, and pulled up a chair to rest my knee on… Math 101: where I was the biggest asshole in the history of ever.)

I may have mentioned that I’m a stubborn ass Polak…and I like to do things for myself. I don’t like to rely on other people, and I certainly like to push my limits. So I always wanted to keep moving and get my mobility back. But I did what my physical therapist friend who was a physical therapy major said. I even used the elevator when I wanted to take the stairs (Yes, there was a time when I wanted to take the stairs! (I don’t particularly care for elevators. After you’ve been in a few too many over-stuffed elevators that have ever gotten stuck or gasp dropped a few floors, you wouldn’t either!)

So I was feeling a little pain after a long day of walking to class…and I thought to myself, Self, you should ice your knee. So I got up from watching bad college TV (at one point we had a lava lamp channel!) and started to head toward the stairs. I thought twice and decided…No, Chrissy…it’s already been a long day. Suck it up and take the elevator. So I walked to the elevator. Rode up to the second floor. Made my way to the laundry room, which had two doors on either side of the floor (girls on one side, guys on the other). I walked into the laundry room with the sound of dudes’ laughter on the other side. But the second step, I slipped comic-style with one foot in the air and my ass going toward the ground. My knee was shot. Again. I screamed the way that I scream when I injure myself or see a spider or accidentally forget to take cookies out of the oven and burn them. And the boys on the other side of the door looked at me like I was crazy.

And I panicked.

Again.

And when I saw the apparatus of my demise…I was like, why the fuck is there a rotten strawberry on the floor of the Willy 2 laundry room? And then I remembered that one of my dear friends had also banged some dude in that same tiny laundry room and decided that it was better not to ask questions like that.

I crawled back downstairs and handled myself…and called my physical therapist friend who was a physical therapy major…she came over and told me I was an idiot and had sprained myself again. I whined, “But I took the elevator and was getting ice and everything!!! It was that fucking strawberry!!”

A fucking strawberry.
Not a banana; that would be too cliche.

A fucking strawberry.

9 years ago.

And yet, just this year, Katie, my favorite little bookworm, Katie decided to tell me that she saw the strawberry…a few days before my little slip. And didn’t like…tell maintenance or anything. So, you know…if you don’t visit her blog today in solidarity with me and the strawberry incident… And she’s been begging me to tell this story. (I’m not going to lie, it was my favorite to tell on first dates. It gave me an idea of whether a dude could handle my shit or not.)

A fucking strawberry. In a laundry room.

Are you kidding me?