By Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:
A BROKEN ARM STORY
I heard the snap. And that snap came when Debbie’s knee pressed into my upper arm as we fell onto the hallway floor and then rolled.
We had been running when Debbie and I slipped on loose papers on the floor. My friends and I were cleaning out our lockers after school that day, thus the mess.
Eighth grade. That was the year of my broken arm. In a recent column, I wrote about my dream of becoming a Harlem Globetrotter, or at least a local basketball star, and it was this broken arm that cost me some momentum. I was angry that this accident took me out at the beginning of basketball season, but before I had a chance to be angry, I was in pain.
As I sat up on the floor of the hallway, I grabbed my left arm which was feeling squiggly. I was wearing a new purple long-sleeved shirt and I looked down and could see that my arm was bent above the elbow. “This can’t be good,” I thought.
And it wasn’t. My arm was loose and dangling. And it suddenly weighed a lot. If I had let go of my wrist while standing, I’m sure my arm would have stretched to the floor like that of a cartoon character.
My mother worked out of town, so my friend Karla called her mom and Carole Mead drove me and my squiggly arm to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Larned.
That arm was dented inward dramatically – any person could clearly see that because of my close-fitting sleeve. And yet a nun grabbed my left elbow just below the break, yanked me toward the X-ray room and said, “We’ll need to get an X-ray to see if it’s broken.”
Since the brokenness was pretty obvious, I couldn’t believe she worded it that way. And I couldn’t believe the pain she was inflicting. But I didn’t kick her, which, honestly, was my first inclination.
A while later Dr. Brenner, who had delivered me 13 years earlier, arrived at the emergency room. He showed me the X-rays. The two pieces of my left humerus were separated and the bottom half was at an angle.
The doctor cut off my shirt sleeve and explained that to get the bone to set properly, he’d have to add weight to the cast at my elbow, to pull that bone down and into place. So he added more and more plaster-coated strips there until I had an embarrassingly huge cast. Could this get any worse?
In the rugged emotional terrain of junior high, I didn’t want to stand out or be different. I was already the world’s worst, or perhaps the world’s best, blusher. It didn’t take much attention for my face to turn cherry red at which point classmates turned and pointed at me, in a fond way of course.
With problems such as blushing, broken bones, acne, a misspelled word that gets us kicked out of the spelling bee, there’s always an opportunity for growth. Life gifts us with challenges that we may see as catastrophes at the time, but we get through them and we learn from them.
I used to think that learning a lesson was an event-specific thing, such as “I learned not to run in the hallway.” But then I began to realize that lessons push us toward a better life, and that we are given the same lesson over and over until we learn it. Perhaps my junior high problems offered the opportunity for me to not take things so seriously, or to accept that it was OK to be different.
Anyway, yes, the broken arm thing did get worse. With the school Christmas program coming up, one day in class the vocal music teacher announced his brilliant idea. “Cheryl,” he said, his eyes glimmering, “We’ll have you sit in a cozy chair like you’re at a ski lodge with a broken bone and all the boys will gather around and serenade you!”
I still cringe every time I hear the song, “Sleigh Ride.”
Yes, I was forced to sit on stage, damaged, in front of the whole town of Pawnee Rock, with that broken arm as the main attraction, and the boys in my class singing to me whether they wanted to or not.
My face was red the whole time. At least I was the right color for the season.
Copyright 2012 ~ Cheryl Unruh
Oh, what memories! What a terrible time of life to have to do such growing. Did you really misspell a word in a spelling bee too? So did I–misspelled a very simple word I definitely knew, and than sat with tears in my eyes and spelled silently to myself, correctly, all the other words in the bee.
Good ol’ Doc Brenner, explaining the whys and wherefors as he examined and treated you and being as calm and matter-of-fact about it as if he were announcing it had begun to rain. Then again, as a survivor of the Bataan Death March and years as a POW, he couldn’t have been rattled by much of anything.
As long as there was a twinkle in his eye, I knew whatever I was there for wasn’t too serious. And I still remember the suckers wrapped in cellophane that had what seemed to be a starched loop of thin white rope as the “stick.”
Kris- Exercise. I put a z in it, as in realize, etc. I am still in disbelief/denial that it is spelled with an s.
Stan. I almost mentioned those suckers. My favorites were the ones shaped like green typewriters. And I want to read Dr. B’s book sometime.
Love every line of this, but especially like this one: “With problems such as blushing, broken bones, acne, a misspelled word that gets us kicked out of the spelling bee, there’s always an opportunity for growth. Life gifts us with challenges that we may see as catastrophes at the time, but we get through them and we learn from them.” Thanks for the lift and the reminder….
Old, rural doctors are a wealth of stories. During my time in Quinter, I attended a historical society meeting at which a retired doctor spoke of how he had come to Quinter (his car broke down there on his way to Colorado), and what it was like to practice medicine there. Many in the audience had either delivered, or had been delivered at his hand, most, he said, for a $30 fee or some sort of livestock. It was a joy to all who knew him, and to me. Your Dr. Brenner seems cut from the same cloth.