The Time I Broke My Arm

            There are a couple of “staples” I tell in social settings (bars, parties, dates, random encounters because I’m awful at small talk), and the one I think I’ve been using the longest is the story of how I broke my arm when I was seventeen. Now, there’s nothing spectacular about how I broke my arm, but the story itself is somewhat entertaining when I tell it.

So this story actually starts with my grandfather. My grandpa, long before I was born, was the right combination of smart and lucky, and by virtue of those two things ended up retiring as one of many vice presidents at his company, whose primary business is government contracting for aerospace and defense projects. We like to say Papa was a rocket scientist, but he was always more of a businessman, which is good for us because businessmen have better stock options than engineers. So the best presents on our birthdays and Christmas have always come from my grandpa. It also happened to be that for most of my childhood, my grandpa split his time between Colorado and Florida, and he usually left for Florida around September, when my brother’s birthday is.

The year I was seventeen, we celebrated my brother’s birthday with my grandpa on a Monday, even though Paul’s birthday was on that Friday, so that he could give Paul his present in person. That year, RipSticks were the new big thing, and since you probably don’t remember what that is, let me explain it. Some moron somewhere said “You know skateboards and how the kids just eat that shit up? Well, I don’t think the skateboarding industry has hospitalized enough of our youth, so we better take two of the wheels off and put a joint in the middle so it’s extra unstable. They’ll love that!” I think they stopped just short of marketing the damn things as “death on wheels, because skateboarding wasn’t dangerous enough as it is.” And that’s what my grandpa got my brother for his birthday that year.

Now, Paul is one of those kids who, despite not being particularly active, can take one look at anything that might be considered a vehicle, even in the loosest sense of the word, and make it look easy and awesome on his first try. So when he got that RipStick, within five minutes he was swooping up and down our driveway like it was easier than walking, and significantly cooler looking.

So me being me (read: competitive and continually over estimating my own coordination), I had to try it. That Friday, so Paul’s birthday, I got home from school and was in such a good mood, I decided today was the day I was going to teach myself to ride that stupid RipStick. I parked the car, waved to my mother who was in the process of cleaning up a small garage sale, grabbed the RipStick, and went on my merry way. Of course, seeing me grab The World’s Worst “Toy” Ever, my mom insisted I wear a helmet, which might have made the difference between me writing this and me slurring that I want more applesauce because I spilled the first cup down my bib. If I’d actually belted the helmet, I probably also wouldn’t have spent my senior year being addressed as “Frankenstein-ella” by my dad (he’s not super creative).

So I got up on the RipStick, helmet jammed on my head and unbuckled because I’m stupid like that, and quickly became frustrated by my inability to get it going. I’m sure there’s a convoluted explanation about the physics that make this thing go, but basically, it works like this: there are two foot sized platforms with a wheel at each end, and a lubed up pole in the middle that allows the platforms to twist in opposite directions. By making a swiveling motion with your hips, the dumb thing moves in a generally forward direction. Or if you’re me, you make two swivels and fall off. After a couple tries, I managed to work my way out of the safety of our very flat cul-de-sac, and onto our very steep main street. I also figured out, almost simultaneously, that it is way easier to stay on top of a RipStick when you’re trucking down a hill.

There were about two seconds of “Hey, cool, I did it!” before I realized that at the end of our street, which was very quickly approaching, was a curb, and hitting it would launch me into hip-high grass that I knew concealed at least one large rock and probably a couple snakes. I know the snakes don’t sound like a big deal, but they are and I’ll explain that later. But I realized that really my only option was to “abort mission” as quickly as possible, and that meant jumping off. Now, I might have mentioned that I have next to no coordination, so somehow by jumping off to my left, I managed to pirouette mid air and land facing the opposite direction on the right side of my body.

I remember jumping, I don’t remember the twist, but the next – and very vivid – memory is of two distinct bounces. The first was the visor of my helmet hitting the pavement and then popping off my head, and then the next and less forceful bounce of my face meeting pavement with more enthusiasm than I had really anticipated. I think I blacked out for a moment, but I propped myself up and immediately checked my teeth and my lips. Last time I crashed that hard on a bike, the only damage had been a chipped baby tooth and a fat lips. This tells you exactly how physically inactive I am, that the last time I’d physically injured myself before this, I still had my baby teeth. Satisfied that my mouth was intact, I got back up and began collecting my scattered things – RipStick, helmet, and sunglasses. I knew almost immediately that my arm was a little messed up, because I couldn’t carry the RipStick with that arm, and instead had to cradle it against my body with my arms sticking out like I was a retarded T-Rex. I felt a little banged up, but at this point I figured I just needed to ice my elbow so that the feeling would come back, lay down, and pretend nothing ever happened.

The way I remember it, I scooped everything up, got to our driveway, and calmly called, “Hey Mom?”

The way my mom remembers it, I hobbled up to the middle of our cul-de-sac and shouted, “MOM!” in such a pathetic voice that all her maternal instincts were instantly thrown into high gear. She ran out to the driveway, worried to begin with, and what should she see but her seventeen year old daughter who can barely manage stairs without personal injury, limping forward with an arm that already looks “wrong” and blood pouring down her face “like Carrie, but worse” and sheet white to boot. I didn’t realize it, but that second bounce had scraped an abrasion all the way from my right eyebrow to almost my hairline, leaving a giant, raw, bleeding gash that you could actually see my skull through.

So mommy scoops me up in a whirlwind of matronly concern, and plops me at the kitchen table. As luck would have it, my registered nurse of a grandma had passed away earlier that year, and my mom had been going through all the professional grade medical supplies left over, looking for what was worth saving. And it all happened to be on the kitchen table. Like even in death, my grandma saw me grabbing that RipStick and said, “This isn’t going to end well.” So mom stuck a giant wad of gauze to my forehead, slammed some ice on my elbow, and said “We’re going to the emergency room. Now.”

I weakly protested, even as the last bit of shock was wearing off. I also, reportedly, said I felt really dehydrated right before I passed out for a second time on the walk to the car.

My mom took one look at the gushing wound on my head and immediately knew she wanted a plastic surgeon stitching it up, and for that we needed to go to the hospital 30 minutes away instead of the urgent care center 15 minutes away. Longest 30 minutes of my life. We didn’t know it at the time, but I had managed to crack the end of my elbow, and bones bleed. So as time passed, a very short amount of time, mind you, the space around my elbow filled up with blood from the greenstick fracture, and that blood started pressing on the break, which made it hurt more. The pain quickly escalated, like in a matter of minutes, from “Ow, that’s starting to hurt,” to me sobbing hysterically and clutching my arm, convinced that it was going to fall off. Also, to make me extra beautiful in this time of hardship, I’d already soaked through the gauze on my head. So when we rolled up to the ER, my face was mostly just a puffy mess of blood and snot that my mom was occasionally wiping from my face so I wouldn’t swallow it in the middle of my open mouthed sobbing. I remember, very distinctly, sitting across from a Mexican couple holding a baby that couldn’t have been more than 9 months old and clearly on the edge of pneumonia-induced death, and glaring at the baby because I didn’t want it getting admitted before me. I think they actually admitted me first not because I was more serious, but I was by far being the bigger baby.

Anyway, they admit me, clean up my face enough that I didn’t look like a snotty crypt keeper, pumped me full of drugs, and then left me there for an hour and a half. Someone had just had a heart attack, and no one was free to take care of me, but in my vicodin induced slumber, I didn’t mind so much. An hour and a half later, they gave me another dose and then started running tests. Let me tell you, you will never sleep better than on a hospital gurney pumped full of opiates. It was great. It was so great, I fell asleep in the MRI machine. However, when they woke me up to go get me x-rayed, that’s when shit got real.

I think by now I’ve established that I have a very low threshold for pain. I don’t know if you’ve ever broken your elbow (not your arm, there’s a distinction here), but the elbow is responsible for two main motions. Bending your arm (obviously), and also turning your arm over. You might think that second one is the responsibility of your wrist, and it very well could be a cooperative venture between the two joints, but surprisingly, when you’ve cracked the end of your ulna like a cheap fortune cookie, to take xrays of it there is significantly more twisting than bending happening, and IT HURTS LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER. By this time, the drugs have worn off enough that I appear to be capable of being responsible for moving my arm. They told me to turn my arm, and I think my response was something along the lines of “Make me.” So they did.

It took two nurses and my mother holding me down to get those x-rays because I started throwing punches.

They also had to shut the door despite the intense heat an x-ray machine will generate in a short amount of time because I was screaming so loud that children in the lobby could hear me, and started screaming too.

That’s really the climax of the story, because after that they were able to determine there was a hairline fracture on the end of my arm bone and it was a simple matter to make a brace for me and stick me in a sling. Yes, you read that right, I only needed a brace, not a cast. In fact, the break was so small that all of the pain was coming from the swelling, and the best way to get my bone to reabsorb the blood was to continue using it. I milked the “broken arm thing” for about a week longer than the doctor told me to, though.

There was also a plastic surgeon who was kind enough to suture up my face with no less than 28 individual stitches in three layers of skin. I still sport a scar from the gash that makes my right eyebrow grow in wonky, and there’s a pattern of freckles across my forehead where the abrasion was. If you catch me without make-up one day, I’ll show you, since by now they really have faded so much that you can feel them better than you can see them.

Also, this is why I never EVER get near anything with fewer wheels than God intended.