![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistMy best friend Ali and I knew it was a bad idea as soon as the bus turned into the McDonald's parking lot. Fat-food stops on marching band trips are common, of course. But, crucially, they are supposed to occur after the parade. McDonald's food is no good anyway, but I would think it's especially not something you want rumbling around the stomaches of ninety teenagers when they're marching around zipped into neck-to-toe wool in the summer heat.
We were right to predict doom. Doom showed up, quicker and stranger than we'd imagined.
Walking from the bus to the restaurant, I fell. I was on perfectly smooth, flat asphalt, and I fell down. I have never been quite sure how this happened, though I think it might've been that I was walking too fast on sandals that slid around on my feet. Or just, y'know, Eris.
Ali found my mom, a chaperone for this trip, and insisted I tell her what had happened. I said sheepishly that I fell, feeling about six years old (except when you're six, a Band-Aid cures you). The pain in my scraped knees and wrists started to fade, but that in my foot did not. "I think it's broken," Ali kept telling me. I scoffed, though Ali must be an expert in breaking things by now: she feels about broken toes and fingers less strongly than most people do about paper cuts, and she breaks them probably more often than I get paper cuts). I couldn't possibly have broken anything with a stunt like the one I'd just pulled.
By the time we got to the field where we were supposed to set up for the parade, I wasn't sure I'd be able to march at all. My mom saw my foot starting to swell in my sandals and made me put on my marching shoes (I now wonder why cramming an injured and painful foot into a tight shoe was a good idea, but at the time I didn't question it), but other than that I stayed out of uniform and merely watched the parade go by.
Mom's plan was to leave my foot alone until the morning, but I couldn't sleep until she wrapped it in one of her sprained-ankle bandages. I could move my toes, so I still didn't think I'd broken anything, but just having the sheet over my foot, or trying to move my leg, hurt like crazy.
The next morning I had to go to the damn dentist. A month or two before the dentist said, "Those wisdom teeth have to come out." I'd never had so much as a cavity before, and this news came as a terrifying shock to me. He said he didn't want to do it until after graduation—in other words, he didn't want me to miss school; he wanted me to be miserable during the summer—so it was scheduled for a couple of weeks into June. Just as the marching band season was getting started. "Do they hurt?" he asked me about these traitorous teeth. "No," I replied. He grinned at me. "They will."
I pleaded with my mom to let me reschedule the appointment. I hadn't slept much, I already had enough wrong with me for one day, and besides, I wasn't at all impressed with this wisdom teeth thing. They still didn't hurt. I could see them in the back of my mouth, minding their own business. Of course she wouldn't listen; she just gave me a bowl of cereal and two Advils, having been told that I should eat something and take some ibuprofen to help with the swelling. "The swelling" seemed a very ominous phase to me; I didn't like it at all.
Speaking of swelling, getting my shoes on was out of the question that morning. I went to the dentist in my brother's old sneakers, with the laces pulled really tight on my left foot and not tied at all on my right. I was not happy.
They gave me gas as well as the novacaine. This was supposed to make me happy. It didn't work. I sat terrified the whole time. With each move the dentist made, each thing he touched or picked up or said, I was torn between the desire to ask "What's that?" in a panicky voice and the desire to not know, ever. In some cases I asked when I probably shouldn't have, and the dentist was good enough to give me sufficiently vague answers that I didn't kill him with my bare hands.
Then, bloody cotton in my mouth, I finally went to the doctor, who took X-rays and immediately declared that she was sending me to the bone specialist in Albert Lea. It was definitely broken, and in a weird enough way that she wasn't going to touch it. She gave me a splint and some crutches, chiding me for walking on it as much as I had. Like that had been my idea of fun. So Mom and I were back in the car again. (And do you know how difficult it is to get into the right side of a car when you have just been told not to put any weight on your right leg? Thank God this was before my parents started buying SUVs.)
The bone doctor (whose name was Schoen but pronounced, at least by my mom, so it rhymes with bone) told me that I'd broken a commonly-broken bone, but in a weird place. I was vaguely proud of this. He also said that it had the potential to give me arthiritis when I'm older, as it's technically at a joint, but as it's a "fixed" joint that doesn't move, that's not a big deal. Joints that don't move! I suppose my biology classes were supposed to teach me that such wonders exist, but they didn't do as good a job of it as did that X-ray of my broken foot.
That evening, a different facet of the high-school band, jazz rather than marching, was supposed to play at one of those lovely midwestern events, the Ice Cream Social. And I wanted to go. Mom thought I was crazy, but after an afternoon spent on the couch watching TV, asking her to alternate bringing me cold and warm washcloths for my face (this was also recommended to help with the swelling) and learning how to use crutches, I didn't want any more of that sort of craziness. I wanted to go. Besides, I played bass in and thought I was important, even though none of the horn players listened to the rhythm section nearly as much as they should've. (And even I wouldn't have thought I could play that night if I was playing a wind instrument.)
I showed up in the band room to collect my bass and my amp and Ali saw me—on crutches, still bleeding through wads of cotton in my mouth—and said, "I knew it! You broke your foot!" She had some warning, but I looked like a disaster to everyone else. They'd seen me the evening before, and I looked fine then!
I kept being asked, "What happened?" and for the first couple of people I had nothing better to say than the truth: "Uh, I fell down, on some pavement." It had not occurred to me to come up with an answer for this yet, as I had not been asked. But after two or three lame attempts at explanation, another kid in the band room answered the repeated question before I got the chance: "Skateboarding," he said matter-of-factly. I laughed. He may have had a twisted, broken, sprained, or mutilated something-or-other every year due to skateboarding (or snowboarding in the winter), but I was not that type. That was, of course, why I found this explanation so delightful.
I started using it myself sometimes. A guy at my church just shook his head and said something about us crazy kids when I told him. I couldn't believe it'd worked. Did I seem the skateboarding type? It was much better than the true story. I found out that my mom was telling people that I'd fallen getting off the bus (where she got that from I'll never know), so for a while there were three distinct stories circulating about the source of my injury.
This was, of course, the end of my marching band career for the summer—and, indeed, for good. I got the cast off about two days after the last parade. In the meantime, no one wanted to sign my cast, so I drew pictures on it. I drew a dinosaur, and a hamburger, and a Band-Aid over the part of my foot that had broken. (Run your fingers along the outside of your foot, down past your pinky toe towards your heel. Feel a little bump there? That's what I broke. That bump is just a little bigger on my right foot now than on my left.)
One day Ali and I went shopping and she got some toe socks, the first I'd ever seen. She came back and put them on and matched up some of her acrylic paints to those colors and painted my cast (walking cast, by then) to match. The cast, in fact, was nearly as colorful as my foot when they took off the regular cast and gave me the one I could walk on. I didn't get to examine my foot closely, but even at a glance it was multicolored and amazing: some of the bruises had gone yellow and greenish, some were still red and blue and purple.
I learned some things while my foot was broken. I learned that stairs were evil. Showers were impossible: don't get this leg wet, and don't stand on it? Oh yeah, that's gonna happen. Getting into cars was tricky, as I said. Having a broken bone also makes you appreciate your friends; Ali was so nice about lugging around my bass and amp on a few occasions. I learned how to get very good at standing on one leg. And hopping on one leg. I'm very left-footed now.
Going to the mall usually meant getting a wheelchair, because I got tired and achy on the crutches after twenty minutes or so. I didn't like the wheelchair; it made it hard to browse in the bookstore. But when I found something I liked on a high shelf and jumped up—on my good foot only, of course—to look at it, I sometimes surprised people. I felt like I should've been yelling "The good Lord Jesus has healed me!" or something, but I'm too Midwestern for that even if it is funny.
I can still tell that my left leg is bigger and more muscular than my weakling little right leg, which got six weeks off a few summers ago.
We were right to predict doom. Doom showed up, quicker and stranger than we'd imagined.
Walking from the bus to the restaurant, I fell. I was on perfectly smooth, flat asphalt, and I fell down. I have never been quite sure how this happened, though I think it might've been that I was walking too fast on sandals that slid around on my feet. Or just, y'know, Eris.
Ali found my mom, a chaperone for this trip, and insisted I tell her what had happened. I said sheepishly that I fell, feeling about six years old (except when you're six, a Band-Aid cures you). The pain in my scraped knees and wrists started to fade, but that in my foot did not. "I think it's broken," Ali kept telling me. I scoffed, though Ali must be an expert in breaking things by now: she feels about broken toes and fingers less strongly than most people do about paper cuts, and she breaks them probably more often than I get paper cuts). I couldn't possibly have broken anything with a stunt like the one I'd just pulled.
By the time we got to the field where we were supposed to set up for the parade, I wasn't sure I'd be able to march at all. My mom saw my foot starting to swell in my sandals and made me put on my marching shoes (I now wonder why cramming an injured and painful foot into a tight shoe was a good idea, but at the time I didn't question it), but other than that I stayed out of uniform and merely watched the parade go by.
Mom's plan was to leave my foot alone until the morning, but I couldn't sleep until she wrapped it in one of her sprained-ankle bandages. I could move my toes, so I still didn't think I'd broken anything, but just having the sheet over my foot, or trying to move my leg, hurt like crazy.
The next morning I had to go to the damn dentist. A month or two before the dentist said, "Those wisdom teeth have to come out." I'd never had so much as a cavity before, and this news came as a terrifying shock to me. He said he didn't want to do it until after graduation—in other words, he didn't want me to miss school; he wanted me to be miserable during the summer—so it was scheduled for a couple of weeks into June. Just as the marching band season was getting started. "Do they hurt?" he asked me about these traitorous teeth. "No," I replied. He grinned at me. "They will."
I pleaded with my mom to let me reschedule the appointment. I hadn't slept much, I already had enough wrong with me for one day, and besides, I wasn't at all impressed with this wisdom teeth thing. They still didn't hurt. I could see them in the back of my mouth, minding their own business. Of course she wouldn't listen; she just gave me a bowl of cereal and two Advils, having been told that I should eat something and take some ibuprofen to help with the swelling. "The swelling" seemed a very ominous phase to me; I didn't like it at all.
Speaking of swelling, getting my shoes on was out of the question that morning. I went to the dentist in my brother's old sneakers, with the laces pulled really tight on my left foot and not tied at all on my right. I was not happy.
They gave me gas as well as the novacaine. This was supposed to make me happy. It didn't work. I sat terrified the whole time. With each move the dentist made, each thing he touched or picked up or said, I was torn between the desire to ask "What's that?" in a panicky voice and the desire to not know, ever. In some cases I asked when I probably shouldn't have, and the dentist was good enough to give me sufficiently vague answers that I didn't kill him with my bare hands.
Then, bloody cotton in my mouth, I finally went to the doctor, who took X-rays and immediately declared that she was sending me to the bone specialist in Albert Lea. It was definitely broken, and in a weird enough way that she wasn't going to touch it. She gave me a splint and some crutches, chiding me for walking on it as much as I had. Like that had been my idea of fun. So Mom and I were back in the car again. (And do you know how difficult it is to get into the right side of a car when you have just been told not to put any weight on your right leg? Thank God this was before my parents started buying SUVs.)
The bone doctor (whose name was Schoen but pronounced, at least by my mom, so it rhymes with bone) told me that I'd broken a commonly-broken bone, but in a weird place. I was vaguely proud of this. He also said that it had the potential to give me arthiritis when I'm older, as it's technically at a joint, but as it's a "fixed" joint that doesn't move, that's not a big deal. Joints that don't move! I suppose my biology classes were supposed to teach me that such wonders exist, but they didn't do as good a job of it as did that X-ray of my broken foot.
That evening, a different facet of the high-school band, jazz rather than marching, was supposed to play at one of those lovely midwestern events, the Ice Cream Social. And I wanted to go. Mom thought I was crazy, but after an afternoon spent on the couch watching TV, asking her to alternate bringing me cold and warm washcloths for my face (this was also recommended to help with the swelling) and learning how to use crutches, I didn't want any more of that sort of craziness. I wanted to go. Besides, I played bass in and thought I was important, even though none of the horn players listened to the rhythm section nearly as much as they should've. (And even I wouldn't have thought I could play that night if I was playing a wind instrument.)
I showed up in the band room to collect my bass and my amp and Ali saw me—on crutches, still bleeding through wads of cotton in my mouth—and said, "I knew it! You broke your foot!" She had some warning, but I looked like a disaster to everyone else. They'd seen me the evening before, and I looked fine then!
I kept being asked, "What happened?" and for the first couple of people I had nothing better to say than the truth: "Uh, I fell down, on some pavement." It had not occurred to me to come up with an answer for this yet, as I had not been asked. But after two or three lame attempts at explanation, another kid in the band room answered the repeated question before I got the chance: "Skateboarding," he said matter-of-factly. I laughed. He may have had a twisted, broken, sprained, or mutilated something-or-other every year due to skateboarding (or snowboarding in the winter), but I was not that type. That was, of course, why I found this explanation so delightful.
I started using it myself sometimes. A guy at my church just shook his head and said something about us crazy kids when I told him. I couldn't believe it'd worked. Did I seem the skateboarding type? It was much better than the true story. I found out that my mom was telling people that I'd fallen getting off the bus (where she got that from I'll never know), so for a while there were three distinct stories circulating about the source of my injury.
This was, of course, the end of my marching band career for the summer—and, indeed, for good. I got the cast off about two days after the last parade. In the meantime, no one wanted to sign my cast, so I drew pictures on it. I drew a dinosaur, and a hamburger, and a Band-Aid over the part of my foot that had broken. (Run your fingers along the outside of your foot, down past your pinky toe towards your heel. Feel a little bump there? That's what I broke. That bump is just a little bigger on my right foot now than on my left.)
One day Ali and I went shopping and she got some toe socks, the first I'd ever seen. She came back and put them on and matched up some of her acrylic paints to those colors and painted my cast (walking cast, by then) to match. The cast, in fact, was nearly as colorful as my foot when they took off the regular cast and gave me the one I could walk on. I didn't get to examine my foot closely, but even at a glance it was multicolored and amazing: some of the bruises had gone yellow and greenish, some were still red and blue and purple.
I learned some things while my foot was broken. I learned that stairs were evil. Showers were impossible: don't get this leg wet, and don't stand on it? Oh yeah, that's gonna happen. Getting into cars was tricky, as I said. Having a broken bone also makes you appreciate your friends; Ali was so nice about lugging around my bass and amp on a few occasions. I learned how to get very good at standing on one leg. And hopping on one leg. I'm very left-footed now.
Going to the mall usually meant getting a wheelchair, because I got tired and achy on the crutches after twenty minutes or so. I didn't like the wheelchair; it made it hard to browse in the bookstore. But when I found something I liked on a high shelf and jumped up—on my good foot only, of course—to look at it, I sometimes surprised people. I felt like I should've been yelling "The good Lord Jesus has healed me!" or something, but I'm too Midwestern for that even if it is funny.
I can still tell that my left leg is bigger and more muscular than my weakling little right leg, which got six weeks off a few summers ago.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-17 06:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-17 06:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-17 06:54 pm (UTC)When I broke my right hand (in four places, and dislocated my little finger -- don't ask) I had to dictate all my schoolwork but at least I could shower. I do, however, now have arthritis in that part of my hand, and type asymmetrically. On the left, I'll use all four fingers and my thumb, but on the right, I type with only three fingers and my thumb. Except, apparently, when I type the pronoun "I." Then I apparently use my pinky on the Shift key. Interesting.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-17 08:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-17 09:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-17 09:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-17 10:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-17 11:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-19 02:24 pm (UTC)Broken face: A butterfly needle in my hand, count to ten, only made it to two. Woke up covered in blood but feeling fantastic, so insisted on going for a walk with my mum around Yarmouth with glazed eyes and a red mouth. I think there may have been drooling. People looked at me very oddly and edged away at my approach. But I was still kind of doped up, so I felt GREAT.
Broken wrist: Big pink painkillers! Six weeks in a cast. Ended up smelling like a wet dog, because I could only shower if a breadbag was involved. But it was only my arm, which didn't really interfere with my strict regime of lounging around watching tv. A broken foot must've been dreadful! They definitely do make you appreciate your friends - who else would have dried my hair to my exact specification and crammed me into my tights? I'm calling that last one a bonding experience.
Wisdom teeth: These have only just started to sneak up on me - I'm not looking forward to it!