A Bruise is a Bruise is a Bruise

Isn't she lovely? Don't ask me where I got a thigh shiner from!
Yesterday, I spent the morning planting and then shopping and then planting again. This entailed at least four wardrobe switches. I change my clothes a lot; I will not go to the store in gardening clothes (as discussed previously, I am a slob and attract mud and filth. Alas.)
So you would have thought I would have seen the above blight on the milk white loveliness of my upper leg... but no! I was changing (for the fourth or fifth time) when I spied what I thought was mud. But it didn't wipe off and in the harsher light of the bathroom, I thought it saw it was discolored and pretty damned gross. I immediately thought of my friend Laurie who had a gigantic bruise appear on the back of her knee and it got all infected and awful and her doctor put her on antibiotics and said it was probably a Brown Recluse Spider bite! I immediately thought, "WTF!!! We're going away to new Bedford for three days and I'll probably wake up in the middle of the night sweating and feverish and hallucinating because I've been poisoned by some infernal arachnid!!!"
So I asked Bob to look at it and he agreed that it was pretty horrific and didn't scoff when I asked him to accompany me to the new medical walk in clinic that opened up the road. I was relieved that he didn't say, "For what? Your leg doesn't look that bad" (which would have made me feel like an alarmist or hypochondriac) but alarmed that he shared my concern. (Which made me more alarmed!)
To end this tale quickly, I'll say the doctor on call at the clinic took one look at my thigh and said, "Looks like a big bruise to me". She then asked my if I'd blacked out recently, to which I demurred- I think I'd remember that! But I also admitted that whether at work or home, I tend to run around and move heavy things (like tables, picture frames, hay bales, wheel barrows and the like) and even run into them. So we agreed that's probably what occurred to cause the above contusion.
But it was still a mystery! I guess I could have done it earlier in the week at work, where "the management" seems to delight in leaving large, heavy items of furniture in doorways, often with pointy ends and edges sticking out at just about thigh level. In any event, it looks better and it is fading to an attractive yellowish purple (with a hint of blue) and it doesn't feel raised up or hot so I think I'll live. And we had a lovely time in Massachusetts where I managed to get to the Cape for the first time in my life!