One weekend my father took my sister and myself and my stepmom and my teenaged stepsister and her friend to the park. We packed an oversized Thremos cooler with sandwiches and corn chips and canned sodas and drove out for a day of play. We found a place to picnic once we arrived and unpacked our belongings, staking our ground. My sister and I immediately sprinted straight for the swings. I hopped on the first one I saw and began pumping my legs in efforts to make my belly-lurching ascent. My sister studied each swing below me, hesitating, but all I could feel was the fall afternoon air cool on my face swinging high toward the trees and the sky and the clouds.
"Can I have your swing? These all have bugs on them," my sister shouted from below. Typically I would tell her to shove off and just wipe the seat clear, but I was feeling nice. It was Park Day, and I could handle some dirt and a few bugs so my baby sister wouldn’t have to.
Without thinking I let go of the chains and launched myself into the air at the swing’s highest climb then fell dozens of feet onto my wrist. My body followed too quickly thereafter.
I didn’t know I had broken my arm even though I heard three snaps and it went completely numb. I didn’t cry, just kicked my legs and wailed. My sister, looking paniced, searched for the nearest adult to help her heap of a sibling, but the nearest family was Asian and spoke no English. My sister ran to find my father and while she was gone I layed on the ground in the most severe amount of pain I’d ever experienced surrounded by startled strangers speaking with a frenzy and in a foreign language. Park Day had just gotten way fucked up.
My Dad came running and at first began inspecting my legs. I had to tell him it was my arm, it’s just I couldn’t move it. Like some sort of superhero he ripped a towel in half lengthwise and fashioned a sling for my gimpy arm. The nearest hospital was 30 miles away and we’d all piled into one car for the trip to the park. I remember sitting on someone’s lap on the way to the emergency room.
Although we didn’t get going to the hospital right away. My stepsister and her scandalous friend went to hide in the woods and smoke cigarettes. When it was time to go get me mended they were nowhere to be found. Finally they emerged stinky from the woods. They got busted that day and I was forever dubbed a nark by my stepsister from then on. Stupid, brittle bones.
Once the endorphins wore off I was in excrutiating pain. A nurse gave me a shot for the pain IN MY BROKEN ARM. Oh God, the agony. There was so much waiting, too. I was told the doctor was going to set my arm 20 whole minutes before it actually happened. I just had to look at my disfigured limb and imagine what putting me back together was going to entail.
Do you know? Have you ever had a broken bone set? If not, let me tell you it is a terrifying, hair-raising horror. The crunch of your bones crudely crunching back into place is a sound you never want to hear.
I wore a hot pink cast home that day. I thought it would be better than the other option, blue, until I got home and realized it clashed with every single thing in my closet. I was 7 or so when this happened and too young to swallow pills. They wanted to prescribe me a pain killer strong enough to mask the pain, but didn’t have anything in liquid form. So the doctor’s idea was to crush up the pill and make me eat it in syrup or jelly. It was torture just to ease the pain of my shattered bone.
That was a really traumatizing time for me. I would, long after I had my cast removed, have phantom pains or my entire arm would go numb. ["Are you talking about that little girl?"] To this day I can’t watch videos of fools on skateboards who break their legs, it fucking kills me. I also don’t like to hear stories of broken bones because the pain was so intense it still gets to me.
My left arm was broken again a few years later in the same place. It is warped now, bowed a little, but you wouldn’t notice unless I pointed it out. But it’s sensitive in that spot to the touch. Put your hand there and I might cringe.