It was a sunny, slightly chilly, autumn day. I was in eighth grade and after hours of hard work during the week, I was looking forward to spending my Saturday having fun with my friends. I never expected that my long awaited day of rest would turn out the way it did. My two friends and I had just eaten lunch, and were playing badminton in my backyard. After a few hours we tired of that and were looking for something better to do.
My garage is full of old stuff. Antique sleds, dusty watering cans, and other unidentifiable objects take up so much space that we can’t park a car inside. On this particular day, we decided to scavenge, hoping to find something to keep us busy. What we found was a pogo stick. It was a rusty old thing with cracked rubber grips, covered with cobwebs and dust. This was perfect. We would overcome boredom by having a jumping contest.
We each took our turns. After about three rounds, we were getting pretty good. But I was sure that I could jump higher than the others. It was my turn next, and I was ready to show my friends what I could do. I placed my feet on the peddles of the pogo stick, and jumped into the air. I hit the blacktop hard.
“Great!”, I thought, “I’m going to beat them for sure!”
But something wasn’t right. The next time the pogo stick hit the blacktop, the pogo stick bounced off at grotesque angle. The next thing I knew, I was in the air, falling. For a second, it was as if time had stopped. I hung, suspended in the air, and knew that something terrible was about to happen. I thought, “Oh, shit!” And then I hit the ground.
For an instant, everything was still. I lay there, trying to figure out what had happened. Then I felt a strange throbbing pressure in my right shin. Quickly the pressure turned into a searing pain, completely unlike anything I had experienced before, so intense that I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. At least not about anything but how much my leg hurt. I began to sob.
“You guys?” I called to my friends, “I think I just broke my leg.”
Suddenly, my entire family was outside. My dad picked me up and carried me to the car, while my mom hurried around, trying to find god knows what, and my brother tried to poke my broken leg. My family doesn’t deal with a crisis well. Soon, everyone was furious and arguing with each other, and I was in the back seat of our van, wailing about how I was sure I was going to die. And we hadn’t even left for the hospital yet.
After about ten minutes, we arrived at Highland Park Hospital. At this point, I was drifting in and out of lucidity. I remember one minute I was in the backseat and then I was in a wheel chair, then a gurney. A group of nurses wheeled me toward the x-ray room.
“Elizabeth?” One of them asked, “Would you like something for the pain now, or will you be alright until we finish the x-rays?” No one ever calls me by my full name. Not ever. And I wasn’t really mentally there. So I didn’t understand that she was talking to me. I didn’t respond. The nurses took me off the gurney and laid me on the cold metal x-ray table. They proceeded to position my injured leg in a multitude of excruciating positions. I blacked out.
Some time later, I awoke in an austere, sterile hospital room in the emergency ward. A smiling doctor stood at the foot of my bed.
“You fainted during the x-rays,” he explained, ”We anesthetized you, and made an incision your leg and removed a few splinters of bone. As you can see from the x-rays, you broke both your tibia and fibula clean through right about here,” he pointed to a spot on my now, gauze bandaged leg. “You will need to stay home from school for a week to recuperate, and then we will put a fiber-glass cast on your leg.”
No comments:
Post a Comment