Just hop around until you stub the other one

What I find interesting is that moment when you can tell it will hurt but it hasn’t been processed by your brain yet.

And then you get to find out just how much it’s gonna hurt.

Many years ago, I think seven but maybe more, I was on a trip with my wife. We were staying at a B&B. One of the nights she went out and I stayed in. I was not familiar with the room but was walking around it with nary a concern on my mind; as a result, when I rounded the coffee table, I casually swung my off foot with the turn, which brought my foot under the edge of the loveseat.

Turns out, there was a 4x4 support exactly in the path of said swing and I had mashed my toes into it with the full force of casual walking turn. I don't remember how much noise I made, but I don't think it was quiet. Recovery for that was basically just limping and complaining for the rest of the trip.

Later, three years ago, I broke my other - before this event, good - ankle in a fall. I went to the hospital and had it surgically addressed. (Incidentally, I actually made less noise than you might expect when all of this happened.)

Now, I'm not often in a position where the best way to pass the time is to hang my head and stare at my naked toes, but it does happen. When it does, I notice that the toes on my right foot (the broken ankle one) are wonderfully straight, aligned parallel to each other, just generally how I imagine healthy toes.

On the left foot - the one that kicked a solid, fixed piece of wood - the toes turn every which way, few or none pointing the same direction; one of them goes fairly straight, then suddenly veers off on a new adventure after the last knuckle; one has a misshapen nail; one has a non-rounded toetip. They don't hurt or (IMHO) look particularly ugly and they're still functional, but they're not the visually idealized version of toes.

I have no idea how my toes looked before either circumstance, so maybe this was always the way, but I always wonder if the left toes got misaligned because I never sought medical attention for it; whether the right ones are so straight because they lined them up in surgery; or maybe some combination of the two.

Anyway, I assume this is the kind of response you were looking for when you made a post about toe stubbing.