Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Walking down the horizontal limb of a big mulberry tree with my buddies, my feet slipped on the bark and I fell to the unforgiving ground below.  I didn’t bounce, and when I got up, my right arm had an extra elbow between my wrist and the natural one.  Running home with my arm hanging down at 90 degrees from its normal position, my folks rummaged around and found a two foot 2x6 and laid the arm out on it, and off we went to the hospital.  The doctor set the broken bones pulling on one end while Dad held the other.  I must have been well sedated because all I remember is wearing home a plaster-smelling cast.  My hygiene skills as a 10 or 11 year-old weren’t too good to begin with, but with the loss of my right arm, my ability to brush my teeth and eat and write and accomplish other dominant hand tasks was severely limited.  I must have  learned to eat as I didn’t starve to death and my standard haircut was a Butch which required little maintenance on my part.  My teacher must have been patient, and so must have been others around me because after a few weeks, the cast began to have a distinctive odor.  It would itch under the cast and I used a coat hanger wire to reach up and scratch in a totally unsatisfying manner, leaving the feeling of a parade of ants creeping around underneath.  My arm was cast with my elbow at a right angle and that plaster was so heavy you would have assumed that I would have had a pretty buff bicep when it came off.  Not so.  A cast saw has a blade that vibrates back and forth such that the stroke is so small that it doesn’t cut the skin underneath.  Before the cast was applied, a cloth wrap was put around the arm and the plaster material which contains gauze inside it is wrapped around the fabric and left to set.  The cloth wrap is what picks up the odor from the millions of dead skin cells and bacteria that slough off and have nowhere to go.  When the plaster was cut and pried off and the cloth cut and removed, I was left with an appendage that I didn’t even recognize.  It was shriveled and shrunken and hairy and, if Stephen Spielberg was looking for an idea of what ET would look like, he could have just extrapolated from my poor arm.  It was weak, as you might imagine, and tender and acted like it belonged to someone else.  It took a while to learn to use it normally again.  The fiberglass casts that kids get today are a whole different story.  They are light and come in so many pretty colors that kids are undoubtedly waiting in line just to break something so they can have such a cool cast.  I wish I could say the whole experience gave me a total aversion to such injuries, but alas, I cannot.  I guess you might say I’m just a good healer.