I Nearly Broke My Leg in Florida
Going Too Fast, Not Being Careful
Your whole life, you are constantly being told to slow down, be careful and do it correctly. There's always a chance that you could really hurt yourself, right? Well, I have always had a really bad habit of quickly brute forcing my way through things. I get irritated by people who work slowly and meticulously. I mean, come on! We have shit to do. Let's get on with it. This way of doing things has worked wonders for me throughout my life, until the day I was stuck unloading a 10X20ft storage unit on my own, on an extremely tight schedule.
This storage unit was extremely tightly packed. It may be a bit hard to tell from the above image, but believe me, it was. About 80% of the storage unit was filled as if by an expert Tetris player, while the front 20% was all the weird shaped items that just got wedged in there the best that they could go.
The Background
Some years ago we decided to move from Los Angeles to Palm Beach County, Florida near where my brother lives. For the price of a tin homeless shelter in Los Angeles you can buy a veritable mansion in Florida. And boy did we buy a ridiculous house. That turned out to be an extremely bad idea for many reasons that I won't get into here. For one, the upkeep on the acres of land was insane, and to keep the place clean was a full time job.
Needless to say, we ended up moving back to Cali. But after living in that massive house for several years, we accumulated a silly amount of crap that we knew we wouldn't have room for in our house in LA, so we temporarily rented a storage unit. This temporarily turned into about 7 or 8 years.
Every few months the storage unit would go up in price. $5 here, $10 there. Finally, this year we got an email stating that the storage unit price would be going up by $100 in the next 2 months. OMFG!!
Apparently, in Florida any landlord can raise rent to any arbitrary value at any time as long as they give a certain number of weeks notice. At any rate, we had to get out of there once and for all!
Initially, I was going to have my eldest son fly down to Florida with me to unload the storage unit into a freight trailer which would haul it here to LA. In the end, my son wasn't able to, so I went on my own.
I was staying with my brother, his wife and kids while down in Florida. My brother offered to help as much as he could, but it was going to be tough because he is a school teacher and the move was during the week. Another annoying thing about these storage units is that they close at 8 or 9pm so you can't really just push through and get the job done. So to get my brother's help, I'd have to wait until he got off of work. The other problem was that he could only help for a couple of hours because he had to pick one of his kids at 6pm.
Basically, I started to freak out and was worried that I wouldn't get the unit emptied in time for the trailer pickup so I started to do dumb, dangerous things.
What you see here is the most annoying ramp design ever made. Don't get me wrong, it is super grippy which is great. But the holes are massive! It makes it impossible to roll anything up it with smaller wheels. It was an absolute nightmare.
After getting super frustrated while loading a particularly heavy box into the trailer, I decided to use my ladder to try to get the box as high as possible. Instead of unfolding the ladder and using it properly, I just leaned it up against the boxes and climbed it. As I was reaching up to place the box, the ladder started to slip. In hindsight, I should have just grabbed onto the already placed boxes and allowed the ladder to fall, but I was so exhausted that I went down with it. Then my foot slipped between two of the rungs and all hell went loose.
My left leg went all the way through as the ladder quickly fell to the ground. Ultimately, I ended up being thrown sideways with my leg mangled in between the rungs of the ladder. Then the heavy box that I was placing fell down on top of me and the ladder.
Most Intense Pain Ever!
I screamed out at the top of my lungs. I could see a guy off in the distance who kind of looked around, then shrugged his shoulders and went on with his day. As I laid there, I was sure that my leg was broken both at the knee and the ankle. When I looked down, my leg looked like it was Z shaped.
It turned out that it was just an illusion. I literally had my phone out and was about to dial 911 while stile mangled up with the ladder - until I looked close. Somehow, my superhuman leg just bent the hell out of the rungs of the ladder without itself breaking.
I slowly slid my leg out of the ladder. Oh my God did it hurt! I became immediately aware that I was not going to be able to walk right. (By the way, the photos were taken by me about 3 weeks after the incident. I can walk now, but it's quite painful)
The photos do not really do it justice. I didn't even photograph my left outer thigh which was super bruised black and blue all the way up. The above picture was taken 2 days after the accident. It actually went on to swell about twice this size, and my foot went purple.
The worst part of the whole thing was that I had a ton of stuff staged in the hallway by the storage unit, and outside of the trailer that I was trying to arrange when I had the accident. I had to hobble around on one leg and put everything away so that I could lock the truck and storage unit before I could leave.
Funny enough, after I beat the crap out of myself, I managed to get more help from my brother. He was incredible at packing the trailer and made my life quite a lot easier. He took time off of work to help me, and I am infinitely grateful!
The image about looks weird because I had just taken off an ice pack. That's what all the little dots are. As mentioned before, this was just the beginning of the bruising. My leg went super purple and black. My left leg as a whole ended up turning a yellow orange color which was pretty freaky!
After all the misery, we finally managed to get the whole unit emptied out with time to spare. It was quite the debacle but we got it done!
After all this I had to fly back to LA, wait for the truck and unload it all. Before flying out, though, I stopped in the hospital and got a quick scan to make sure there were no fractures or blood clots. Someone warned me about DVT and I got a bit freaked out. It turned out that there were no fractures, except for a 'possible hairline fracture to my knee joint'. They gave me a pair of crutches and a knee brace, then sent me on my way.
Back Home, Finally!
It was a hard trip coming home with all that pain, and while hobbling around the airport. It pissed me off a bit that TSA made me remove my leg brace to get through security. WTF? I guess this is the world we live in now.
Several weeks later, I am still in quite a bit of pain but still had to go and unload the whole trailer. Luckily I had friends to help this time. We got it all done in one really long day.
So the moral of this story: Sure, taking shortcuts may serve you for a very long time, but eventually it will come back to bite you very hard! So do things the right way people, don't be like Rick!
This entire post had me feeling anxious as I read it. So much stuff in that storage unit and omg those m price hikes were insane. This has to be done. That injury sounds terrible to deal with, sounds like you were very lucky things didn’t end worse. It’s good your brother was able to save you at the end, sounds like something mine would do for me.
That last photo of the empty unit looks DAMN good!
Believe me, seeing that empty unit was like heaven. The whole thing was the worst moving experience of my life. So many things went wrong with the whole process that I didn't even mention in the post.
A day before the trailer arrived here, I went to the local storage place where I rented a unit to ask them where I could have them park the trailer and the guy looked at me crazy and said "You can't park that in here!" --- BUT a month earlier I had called several times to confirm that I could park it there. It turned into a big fiasco. I could write a whole other post about it... haha
I once went to help somebody move all of their stuff out of their storage unit and when we got there, the place had been taken over by stink bugs. So that was pretty miserable, having to deal with bugs flying all over me non-stop (I don't particularly like bugs much.) However, even that doesn't sound as bad as what you had to do and go through pain-wise.
Oh man, that sucks! The only gross thing I had to deal with was that a container of motor oil had a hole and slowly leaked over several years getting all over several boxes and the floor. Was pretty nasty. You never know what kind of crap you will find after opening a years old unit.
ouch, amputate! 🤣
my granny used to say, haste makes waste
Lol! Well, your granny was a smart lady. Hopefully I will learn from my mistakes!
Hmm, it's just like taking shortcut to success. It is not always as it seems.
Sorry about that. Glad you can walk now. I hope the pains get ease out completely.
It gets a bit better every day. I just have to take it slow and not do anything else silly!
All right. Stay safe.
That hurts, even only by looking at it.
Hope pain gets better as soon as possible.
It is getting there slowly but surely. One day at a time!
OMG 😭😭. So sorry brother. @nuthman I was just seeing this few minutes ago. How is the leg now ? Hope u are on medications already? Greetings from nigeria.
Thank you, @ayopeju! Each day it feels a little bit better. It is most painful when I bend it too far. I am hoping that it will be back to (somewhat) normal in a few weeks!
So sad 😭 , it's very painful to see you..Hope your leg get well soon. God bless you ☺️
Thanks, friend! I am just trying to rest it as much as possible and give it time. It will get better, I just need to not be impatient.... which is hard for me!
Very bad incident you had. That seems to be serious injury but good to know that no fractures happened.
Get well soon ❤️.
Thanks, my friend! It is slowly getting better each day.
We call it school fees.
A painful lesson and I bet you will never use a ladder improperly again.
Time will heal it and I know as I had a few of those Lol.
You are very right! I will never definitely use a ladder properly in the future. It is so dumb that I had to go through this to learn that. I should be old enough to know better!
Oh man, normally it is the quick and easy way that we want to do things and then life happens.
So regard yourself as normal as it happens to all of us. Life's way of teaching us that it's better to be careful and thank goodness that you didn't break a leg.
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BEER.Smart move icing it. I was helping someone move and I had an injury similar to that and I didn't ice it like I should have. Come to find out I had internal bleeding and they ended up having to dig a hole in my leg to clear out the dead tissue that the swelling had killed. It was horrible. I am glad that you were able to recover form this and get your stuff all moved.
Omg that is a scary thought! The swelling has mostly gone down over my whole leg but my knee itself is still a bit big. I guess I will continue icing it. The hospital x-rayed my leg and did an ultrasound. They didn't see any internal bleeding. Hopefully they looked everywhere.
How did you realize that it was been bleeding internally?
It ended up getting infected and I had to go to the hospital and get antibiotics intravenously. Then they sent me to a wound clinic. That's where they started tearing away the dead tissue and found the hematoma underneath. The pictures are nasty, I literally had a hole in my leg. It's never going to be the same either. They said hitting it again even lightly could break it back open and then I have to go back to the wound clinic.
Wow how did they manage to put all that in there hahahaha what a spectacle that was, but how sad what happened to you, I imagine the pain you had, oh no, poor thing, but thank God you're fine and well, I'm back at last. Greetings
Well, it was actually me! Haha! Originally, I had filled a 10x30 foot unit, but needed to save some money, so I sold a few things but it wasn't enough. So I had to VERY CAREFULLY full this unit up. It was like a game of Tetris. It was pretty amazing how much stuff was in there!
Thank you for your kind comments. I am glad to be home, and am recovering - even though my leg still feels pretty terrible. Time will heal all wounds, as they say!
That's the way time will heal wounds, but it's incredible how you managed to put all that in and the bike looked like a Tetris box hahahaha
Anyway, it's great that you've completed the journey. Sometimes you have to endure some pain in order to achieve something. You've taken too much of it. I hope your pain goes away soon. Congratulations.
Thanks, it still hurts, but getting better slowly!