We landed Wednesday and fell into our bunks to sleep off the passage. Thursday there was a Thanksgiving Potluck scheduled before the Thankstaken Feast the Pyrates would be doing that evening (I was to sing shanties with them, you may or may not recall), so Derek baked his special artisan bread and we brought it -- discovering that utensils and plates were not there, I went back for those. It was a big, cheerful, rowdy crowd and Derek got on line with Grant so that we'd get something for dinner :-)

The docks are not floating docks, but they are nice: concrete lined along the edges with white rubber bumpers. Our side deck was lying about 18" from the dock. The tide was down and so as I stepped up from the side deck to the dock, my foot first contacted the white rubber. Turns out that was a bad thing, it was slippery. I started to fall, and did NOT want to plunge into the water with my bag of plates and utensils, water, cups, and place mats, so I pushed myself backward and tried to catch myself by grabbing the lifeline/stanchion. It worked, in the sense that I did not go into the water. But something was wrong with my wrist -- I bellowed, "Ow!" and went down onto the sidedeck. Looked at the wrist - strange bump forming. Pulled off my watchband immediately, expecting swelling. Felt like fainting -- so opened the bag, got out my cup, poured some of the cold water into it, drank it down. Felt a little better.

Meanwhile, one of our boat neighbors, Maury from S/V GypsySails, had been coming back to get wine for the feast, but came running to help. He yelled across the water for Derek (who did not have his phone), and Derek, when he realized what the disturbance was, came running, in flipflops (!)(something the Navy doesn't generally ask their folk to do. It should earn extra agility points on the PRT). Thank goodness Derek had already picked up the rental car! Maury lent me an icepack, stressing that his wife would skin him if it didn't return (we assured him that his skin was safe). We picked up Grant and headed to the E/R of the nearest (small) hospital. Poor Grant had loaded a paper plate with food and left it and his drink to come running... but more on that later.

At the E/R they were not too busy, the local folks either knowing how to deep-fry a turkey without shooting it out of the fryer like a cannonball, or too health-conscious to prepare them that way ;-) They took my data, weight and BP and temperature (I was beginning to feel like the turkey, in fact), and eventually gave me a pain pill (thank you Lawdy) and wheeled me off to the X-ray (again a bit like the turkey, if one cooked with X-rays...). Three positions on the X-ray (straight on the table, angled 3/4, karate chop profile), and didn't that feel special (the pain pill either had not kicked in yet or had a lot to cope with).

Derek and Grant were there in the treatment room, being supportive and cracking jokes, generally making the whole thing a lot more tolerable ("fun" is a word I'd reserve for such experiences without the pain!). They are wonderful in difficult situations!

The on-call doc came in and told me that I had broken my arm rather than a wrist bone per se -- distal radius fracture. But from what they could see, only the one bone was broken, and it was lying in position cleanly, so they put a plaster half-cast under the forearm and wrist for support and bandaged it up, gave me a shot to help with pain and a pill to keep down the nausea, prescription for a few pain pills, and nausea pills, and told me to see an orthopedic surgeon the next day (the Friday after Thanksgiving? In Key West?). Even gave me a name... Catana. Sounds like a good name for a surgeon :-)

Walgreens in town was open, so we filled the prescriptions, watched some of the local kids chasing some of the local chickens, and drove back to the marina through the very non-busy streets.

When we got back to the site of the potluck, no one was still there, but Grant's plate of food and drink and our bag with drinks, were all still there, completely undisturbed. Grant was so happy -- there were also remnants of a few side dishes that held enough to eat -- Grant was delighted with a sweet potato-and-marshmallows side that was mostly not served out, but quite tasty! We brought some of this back to the boat (thank you, Boca Chica boaters!).

When we got back to Parallax, we dropped off Ginger's ice pack at GypsySails -- but a knock on the boat indicated Maury and Ginger were not in. We went back and the guys cheered me up by starting a Harry Potter marathon (love that media library we brought and for which Derek built shelves), and we were eating some of the left-behind sides (thank you so much, people!), when there was a knock on the hull, and there was Maury, with our plate, our good bread knife, and our blue tea towel, which had been used to wrap the bread for the potluck -- also a plate with turkey and a simply wonderful stuffing made with pecans, cranberries, bread cubes and savory, and what seemed to be raisins and small chunks of either peach or apricot. Delicious! I was feeling un-hungry, but I made an exception for a little turkey and some of that delightful dressing.

Night was a little tough, vicodin will only actually dispel about 4 hours of pain, and I was supposed to take one every six hours, so there were some unpleasant times in there. weirdly, the worst pain by morning was coming from my little finger, which had been compressed so much by the wrap that the fingers got cool in the night, and a piece of the stiff underlying half-cast was making a permanent dent in the finger joint. Ow. But it would all be taken care of Friday morning, with a visit to the orthopod... or would it!

Short answer: nope. Not one orthopedic surgeon was open on Friday, nor would be open all weekend, of course. So we trundled back to the E/R, got a re-cast with more room for fingers, and that's going to be it for the weekend. On Monday, with luck, I will find out what's going on in there. Some of the hand bones hurt a lot, too, but I am not poking around, in the belief that if they looked OK on the X-rays, the less moved the better. If any are broken, at least they are aligned enough that they looked OK in the initial X-rays. And maybe it's just bruising making the hand itself hurt. We'll know Monday, I hope!

And that's it for the wrist-tale.

Key West: we've already been to West Marine once, to pick up an adapter to enable us to use the holding tank pumpout carts here. We visited the base, hoping to get a little Commissary shopping done Friday (nope), we'll be doing that today instead, after we locate the Pyrates, or Hurricane himself. We are heading down to Truman Waterfront, to scope out the scene now!