Happy Mother’s Day to one and all!
Today’s story comes at a time that I’m reasonably sure the statute of limitations is well past (and probably a few participants as well).
Sherman…set the wayback machine for the early 1980s when my father was on a two year tour of duty in Europe and I was staying with my mother and stepfather and my brand-new baby brother Benjamin.
As I look back over five decades, I’m rather amazed that there’s only one time I’ve actually broken bones even though I spent more than a few months in casts at the start of the journey (and corrective shoes for at least two years) thanks to club feet pointing in the wrong direction. Those casts would ensure that my time spent in that beautiful old-school crib with wooden slats wouldn’t last long and I’d graduate to an actual bed in just a matter of months!
The day in question was in the 7th or 8th grade and I was scurrying to my next class at Westover Junior High and decided to take the stairs at one of the brick towers at of the corner of the building.
I won’t claim to having a history of actual balance and coordination and I certainly wasn’t likely to win any Olympic medals for gymnastics. It’s not just a matter of being fluffy and panoramic though it certainly helps in the lack of coordination department.
Who knows…maybe the gravitational field of the Earth was in flux and decided to go completely weird at the exact moment I didn’t need them to.
Anyway…whether it was just general clumsiness or specifically falling over my own feet as I’m trying to run up the stairs in a crowd, I managed to do a wonderful job of proving that my mass at 9.8 meters per second squared downward momentum into the metal covered edge of the concrete stairs was an incredibly bad idea and that using my left wrist to try to cushion the impact was an even dumber one.
One trip to the nurse’s office and a call to Mom later and the two of us are on our way to Womack Army Hospital on Fort Bragg to see just how much damage I did.
I can hear what you’re saying right now and yes, Cape Fear Valley Hospital was much closer to our rented house near the school but as I was covered by CHAMPUS thanks to a father in the military, you go to get mended in the facilities that actually would take CHAMPUS in a non-emergency situation.
Had it been an emergency, Cape Fear would have stabilised me and then shipped me off down the All-American Freeway to the other end where Womack sits (and vice-versa for civilians who need medical assistance on post).
We arrive and after the usual massive stack of forms and hurry-up-and-wait and then a bit of nuclear imaging with an X-ray machine, it doesn’t take long for Dr Rodin (I may have that spelling wrong but not quite as wrong as my pain-addled brain was when I first mispronounced it “Rodent” which he accepted with good humour) to come to the conclusion that I’d done a quite professional job in buggering my left wrist but good that would make the most sinister of torturers proud.
I had landed on the point of that metal-covered concrete stair at the exact angle (almost perfectly 90 degrees!) that it took to pop the tops off both of my bones in my lower left-arm right at the wrist and as an added bonus managed to kick the epiphyseal plate (this is what helps your bones grow and eventually goes away after puberty) out of position.
If you were to measure my arms today, you’d notice the left arm is slightly shorter than the right arm…that’d be the epiphyseal plate being buggered a bit. You’d also notice that I don’t have the full range of lateral motion on the left wrist that I have on the right wrist.
But you’d also notice that I have quite a bit of the proper use of that left wrist and that’s because Dr Rodin is easily one of the most gifted orthopaedists the Army has ever had amongst the doctors in their medical corps. He could have been making massive bank in private practise but I’ll be forever grateful to him for being on duty when I came in to get my wrist mended because what he did was nothing short of miraculous.
Now that he knew what I’d done and what it looked like inside, now he set about mending it.
I may be wrong about the order of some of these things because even with a wrist on ice and the stultifying boredom of sitting round waiting for something to happen, the pain I was feeling hurt enough that I wasn’t in the most coherent frame of mind at times.
To that end, I honestly don’t remember which came first…the shot directly into my wrist from a nurse that was nowhere near this cute wielding what looked suspiciously like Captain Ahab’s harpoon containing a substance I was told was supposed to numb the area and reduce swelling but actually felt like magma from directly in the caldera of Kilauea volcano going into my wrist or the contraption that would suspend my arm in the air.
I had a sweatshirt that was emblazoned USA MEDDAC (US Army Medical Activity for those of you who aren’t Army brats) with a cartoon of this huge burly orderly with a huge grin on a his face and a syringe in his hands measured in metres.
That’s what I was thinking of when I saw that needle heading for my wrist but sadly I didn’t pull a “Quincy, M.E.” and faint on the spot. Had I gone unconscious, it probably would have made what came next much more bearable.
I think it was the shot into the wrist that went first but it could have been the other way round.
Enter this diabolical torture device where my arm was suspended in the air using metal Chinese finger traps whilst Dr Rodin would push and manipulate the broken bones and the epiphyseal plate back into the position they ought to be in. Judging by the eventual results, he certainly knew what the hell he was doing and I also certainly knew what the hell he was doing because it HURT LIKE HELL!
After what seemed an interminable amount of pushing, shoving, and other ungodly acts upon my wrists…Dr Rodin was happy with his efforts and it’s time to put my full left arm into a rather itchy and eventually quite disgusting plaster cast for the next several weeks to allow the bones and growth plate in the wrist to heal.
It should come as no surprise that my lactose intolerance was a rather wretched cherry on the top of this miserable experience guaranteeing I’d have an extra 2-4 weeks in the casts. Sadly, calcium enriched orange juice wasn’t really a popular thing back then or else I’d have flooded my system with so much calcium that I’d have been mended within the week! 🙂
Once the cast had set, now the fun *REALLY* began.
And by fun, I mean the exact opposite of that concept in which I saw a side of my mother that to this day absolutely terrifies me and should have terrified that nurse had she the wits enough to realise that my mother’s calm voice is a warning sign we all knew very well to start reckoning up our arms, legs, and minutes left to live with whatever gods may be listening!
You see, it was time to remove the Chinese finger traps from the fingers to release my arm from the tension.
If you’ve ever had the finger traps on your fingers, you know there’s a special technique by which you reduce the grip of the trap by pushing inward to expand it and then gently slide the fingers out.
That’s not what this nurse did.
She started yanking on the finger traps which provided such delightful sharp stabs of pain in the wrist that had just been expertly set and cast and I’m feeling pain that makes everything up to this point seem like a doddle.
The problem was that apparently I was supposed to scream to indicate the level of pain she was inflicting upon me but instead I’m trying to suppress the agony so that I don’t actually pass out and I don’t make a single sound.
Mom sees what’s going on and she knows me well enough (I wouldn’t have been surprised if she empathically picked up the pain screaming through my mind at the time) and I see a look on her face I’ve only seen a couple of times in my life and that’s twice too many!
She steps over and asks the nurse rather pithily (and with some fairly impressive language I’d rarely heard from her) roughly along the lines of “just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?!?”
The nurse tries a variation of “I’m trying to remove the finger traps” which Mom isn’t buying in the least when she points out that she apparently doesn’t know how they work and that she’s really causing her patient massive amounts of pain.
Honestly, I don’t think the nurse was the one that suspended my arm in them…I want to say it was Dr Rodin that hung my arm in the air with the finger traps but again I wasn’t exactly the best witness.
Anywho…welcome to the “Epic Moment of Ultimate F***ing Up!” on the part of this nurse!
She says something to the effect that I’m not telling the nurse I’m in pain at which point my mother tells her pretty point blank in a very calm voice (remember…that’s a warning sign that’s even worse than our first two names starting a sentence!) speaking unpleasant language I will not be repeating here with the gist of being that she needs to move her ass out of the way or she’ll find herself on said ass a couple of seconds later.
Mom then proceeds to show exactly how the traps are supposed to be released without inflicting pain on the patient and adds that I’m not the sort that was going to give someone like her the satisfaction of letting her know she was actually hurting me.
Yeah, Army Brat “with your shield on or on it!” Guilty as charged.
The nurse at least has the good sense to make herself scarce as we go through the discharge paperwork and it’s a minor miracle that she hadn’t disturbed Dr Rodin’s handiwork.
I can laugh about it now but in the moment, it was a miracle we weren’t banned from Womack and my father’s CO given an earful about what had gone down after Dr Rodin had left the room to attend another patient. It’s probably just as well they didn’t because I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have liked her going full-on Mama Bear on them more than she did with that nurse.
And that, dear readers is why this day will always be special to me and my mother even more so!
There’s no one else that’s uniquely qualified to have your back and go full-on Mama Bear on those who would do you ill than your mother. *NO ONE!* There is no creature on this Earth more fearsome than a mother whose children are being threatened or hurt.
I’m just glad she’s on my side…I really wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of that righteous rage! 🙂