Ouch!

Ouch!
Well, we decided to go to this restaurant for lunch instead of the usual schedule of me eating lunch at the school and going back to the hotel while Anthony plays on the internet for 4 hours. We saw the restaurant on one of our expeditions and recognized it as the one that Mr. Son and Ms. Ouahn took us to during our first couple of days in town.
Lunch was excellent. We ordered 5 different entrees off the menu and shared them. I even had two beers with lunch. We had a cubed beef in a light smoky sauce, French fries, pork short ribs cut into 1-inch bites with bone intact, a seafood ‘spaghetti’ and, of course, spring rolls. All that food, plus the drinks, came to less than $20, served at a lovely restaurant. We noticed that the prices on our bill were 5-10,000 more than the prices listed in the menu, and I don’t have the Vietnamese to ask why, but I will just assume that it was the ‘share the plate’ price as opposed to the individual serving price. Whatever. Like I said, the total cost was less than $20, and this was upscale.
On our walk home, I decided to go up a curb onto a sidewalk that I never use. I really know better than to use it. It has a slanting curb, and that slanting curb is covered in green algae from regular flooding. Today, however, I was just concentrating on avoiding the puddles and getting home before the daily deluge, which was brewing noisily, and I didn’t think about the algae. Well, sure enough, coming off the curb I stepped onto a nice, slippery sheet of algae and slid—wham!—onto my butt, catching myself with the base of my left hand, of course. I was fine but when I looked at my hand, that huge vein that runs up my wrist was ENGORGED and throbbing. Crap. Did I bust it open? Did I fracture something into it? Can I still go to Hoi An tomorrow???
We got to the hotel and I immediately, after washing my hands (scrubbing, more like) and getting off my gooey pants, started ‘icing’ it. OK, THAT was a spectacle. Picture me crouched in front of the mini-fridge with a coffee cup (put in there this morning so that I could have cold coffee this afternoon) held up against my hand and wrist. When that cold wore off, I started running my hand and wrist across the frost that has accrued throughout the freezer. Then, I wet down a washrag, but I had to put it in a plastic bag so that it wouldn’t stick to said frost. Somehow, I managed to have cold on it for 15 minutes, with the thunder rumbling outside all the while, threatening our next outing to the internet café.
As I was fixing my wrist as best I could, I mentioned that if the rain started, that was it, we weren’t going out-- we were skipping the café; I had been caught in that nonsense the last 3 days running. I said that I was moving as fast as I could, but if I had to choose between my hand and the internet café…my loving son broke in, “You should choose the café. You have TWO hands.” Smartass. OK, he got a laugh off that one.
We are now at the café, and, after a short power outage, everything is fine, so I will be able to upload this AND keep my hand, which I have typed this entire entry with. It’s gonna be a hell of a bruise, though. I take a picture of it tonight.