My Weird Game Day Injury

Pre-game Unveiling of Last Season's Championship Banner

This is one of my favorite days of the year - first day that the NFL gets back to a full schedule of games.  I headed out to the Houston Texans game this morning with high hopes and expectations, along with a little fear about what key injuries could do to this team.  Injuries killed the Texans last year and fans know that over the course of a 16-game season they are going to happen.  You just hold your breath until they do.

Well, I never expected to be the one injured today - in my first game of the season.

The Texans use some waist-high concrete barriers to guide the crowd from the parking lot into the stadium area.  They are there mainly to keep people from clogging up the lanes of vehicle traffic that are filtering into the parking area.  The problem is that the barriers are so randomly placed that you can find yourself walking into one if you are not paying attention to the people directly in front of you.  Today as we approached one set of the barriers the man next to me suddenly veered in my direction when he discovered that he was about to walk directly into a solid hunk of unmovable concrete.

In the process of avoiding the barrier, he managed to step directly on the side of my right foot, trapping it between the concrete and his own foot.  As I tumbled to the sidewalk, my foot remained trapped against the concrete and I wrenched it on the way down - and scraped a 4-inch by 8-inch patch of hide off the inside of my right arm as I slammed into the edge of the barrier.

I managed to make it all the way through the game and the long walk back to the car (even tolerated a half-time performance by Billy Ray Cyrus) - but one emergency room visit later I am now in a walking cast, have had a tetanus shot, and I'm sitting here with my injured foot elevated while wondering how I'm possibly going to make it to my desk in the morning.

But, hey, we beat Miami 30-10 and don't play at home next week...plenty of time for me to recover.