Broken Arm, Broken Bones, No Broken Arrow

Gabrielle is beautiful. The day she was born, I held her longer than anyone else did, snarling when someone else came close and finally relinquishing her when her mother timidly enqired whether she might hold her baby. I wasn't very gracious. But, dammit, it's my first grandkid (no, I never had children; thought that going straight into grandmother mode was the way to go), and I get dibs on holding the baby.

So, I was lifting the baby, snug in her car-seat, out of the van. There was a log behind me on the edge of the driveway; I tried to take a step backwards, with the full weight of the baby safely just above my center of gravity. Instead, I stumbled back against the log; twisted around to my right so I could deposit baby Gabby on the ground (as I seemed to be falling in that direction anyway), then had to twist again to the side to avoid falling on top of her with all my weight (which is a lot more than I like to think about) and must have put my right hand down to check the fall.

It didn't.

No crunching noise or cracking sensation. Just the view of my forearm bent impossibly back at about an eighty-degree angle. This is something I hope you never see.

I am always amazed at my good fortune, as Gabby's mother was right beside me, and Gabby's father was talking to the next-door neighbor just a few feet away. In his short life Gabby's da has been a firefighter and an ER medic; he has seen a lot of broken bones, and suffered more than his fair share of breaks -- most damagingly when a rookie firefighter accidentally knocked him backwards off the roof of a building. He is a very fine carpenter, and has made some beautiful furniture for me -- and that is not an irrelevant detail, as we'll see in a moment. Gabby's mom got his attention and he was soon inspecting the break, reminding me to breathe occasionally, and talking in that gentle, comforting tone of voice people use when they are trying to divert your attention away from something Wes Craven really would hesitate to put in one of his movies, and which is a sure indication that you've totally done it this time.

And then he was gone. What the. . . ?

Well, it was a little surprising. But I couldn't think of anything better to do just then, so I continued to lie on the well-trimmed lawn and wish the sun weren't in my eyes. That's when I heard the unmistakable snarling of a buzz saw coming from the workshop and the hair on the back of my neck began sticking out at the same angle as my broken bones. However, he finally came back, winding yellow spongy wrapping tape around a beautifully cut one-by-four. He'd cut me a splint from wood he was using for a cabinetry job. (I have it now enshrined in pride of place beside a carved hand on a shelf in my camper.) [Incidentally, it's all Robert Frost's fault that the sound of a saw frightens me so much -- I mean, have ya read "Out, Out --"? Quentin Tarantino could make the movie version of that poem it's so gratuitously gruesome.]

Now came the part I had not been looking forward to. (This is the first time I'd ever broken a bone, never mind two at once, and I'd always wondered what it felt like; so, while it wasn't exactly something I'd been looking forward to, I was able to mark it off a little mental list I keep -- most of my list-keeping is mental, if not downright eccentric -- as being less painful than abscessed teeth.) I knew that someone was going to have to pull my arm back into shape, and I was fairly certain it wasn't going to be me. Shawn hooked my fingers over the end of the one-by-four, and I closed my eyes. . . it was not my bravest moment. I may have -- no, I'm pretty sure of this -- well, let's just say I probably yelled several ugly expletives (learned in Glasgow) in this quiet, suburban neighborhood, and frightened the old blind cat who, along with assorted young children and toddlers, was witness to my cowardly whinging. Sadly, I did not pass out -- I think we all would have enjoyed my being unconscious.

I don't know what the radiologist's problem was. Maybe there was a game on TV? Anyhow, he started yanking my arm round at all sorts of interesting angles until Shawn finally intercepted and probably prevented me from kicking the guy (I was shoeless, true, but I could have still got him good), staying in the room even while the x-rays were taken to hold my arm steady, which might well be more than I would have done were I a guy and were my reproductive parts in such close proximity to the machine.

But finally, now, I could get something for the pain.

Why do emergency room medics derive such copious pleasure from joking about pain? Is it because they know you are going to feel so much better in just a few seconds that you won't sue?

"This is going to feel tight in your chest," the nurse said, helpfully, hooking me up at the wrist. "In fact, some people say it's like having a heart attack."

"Oh, swell," I said, as the juice went in, "it's always good to kn-ugh". . . and then I felt a strong constriction in my chest and felt I might really pass out, this time, as every object in the room was going dark with little sparks shooting out around it, until --

"Hell - ooh!" I crooned, swathed in waves of joyous wellbeing and suddenly delighted at every aspect of life, including the raggedy bits. The pain was still there, but man! I did not give a damn. As in, grooovy. And after that, well, we just sat around and shot the breeze, looked at a few x-rays, giggled, and I did not have a care in the world. Later, they knocked me out so they could "reduce" the arm, despite my babbling that I liked it the size it was, and the rest is a beautiful dream, filled with wild mustangs galloping free across the prairie and butterflies and 1969 and great shoes. . . .