Breaking the bones

When I broke my arm over a year ago, I experienced the worst pain of my life. I struggled to complete daily tasks and couldn’t play sports for months. I have been fully recovered for almost a year, but as my grandparents age and struggle with injury and illness, I reflect on my broken arm and understand their plight.

Breaking+the+bones

It has been exactly 488 days since I broke my arm. Since I had the misfortune of breaking the humerus (the upper bone), I heard a plethora of puns about how “funny” this “bad break” was. Ha, ha, ha.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, please do not attempt the following stunt at home. (But if you do, at least have the decency to break your radius, ulna, wrist or pinkie finger instead of your humerus to avoid tempting someone to unleash their pathetic puns.)

I broke it while tubing, which always puzzles people until they hear that the boat pulling me was going at least 30 miles per hour. It was a fairly choppy day on Lake St. Clair, and the tube bounced outside of the boat’s wake and hit a rogue wave, which bounced my body off the tube and into the water. I hung on with my right arm for a second as the water sucked me off the tube. My bone snapped, and I tumbled into the water. At this point in my story, my listeners grimace, gasp or, if they are teenage girls, respond with “OMG, it must have hurt so much!” Ya think?!

I had to wear a full-arm splint and a sling for two weeks. This wonderful contraption was an abominable mixture of plaster, cotton and enough Ace bandages to wrap a mummy. Oh, and did I mention that I had broken my arm in mid-July when the average temperature was a steamy 87 degrees?

After two weeks, I was lucky enough to switch the splint out for a brace, which I wore for the next ten weeks. Even after I got the brace off, I couldn’t play contact sports or do anything but light exercise with my arm for another two months. I had to miss the second half of my summer swimming season, and I couldn’t do swim team in the fall. In case anyone is trying to add up my total recovery time, it was five months.

I’m right-handed, and I had broken my right arm. I couldn’t function. I now depended on my family to help me with the simplest of tasks: brushing my hair, tying my shoes, making a sandwich. I am not completely independent, and I never was. I had needed my mom’s help to bake a cake or choose a laundry setting for non-t-shirt items, but I had never imagined needing her to help me do something as simple as dress myself.

I resisted. I wanted to ignore my injury. Perhaps if I ignored it, life would go on as normal. Even when I admitted that I couldn’t take full take care of myself, I hung on to whatever of bit of independence, whatever shred of normalcy I could—filling up a glass of water, brushing my teeth, making toast (although buttering it was a different story).

My grandma and grandpa are 86 and 87 years old. They are healthy and fortunate enough to live at home instead of in a nursing home. But, as nearly all people their age do, they have suffered from a variety of ailments over the past few years: memory loss, balance issues, a bad hip and cataracts, likely in addition to a few more that I haven’t been told about. They’ve had to give up things they loved to do: long walks, in my grandma’s case, and badminton for my grandpa. Things like driving or cooking family meals are more difficult for them. And, understandably, they don’t like it one bit.

My grandpa is the more obstinate of the two. He continued to play his beloved badminton on and off for a few years despite tendonitis and a hip injury. Not surprisingly, he has neglected to have his long-overdue cataract surgery. He is disinclined to let my dad run errands for him, and because of my similar experience, I’m guessing this is all because part of him doesn’t want to admit that this is now reality.

That’s the painful thing about injury and illness. It seems so arbitrary, so abnormal, that it doesn’t seem real at first. You go to sleep thinking that life will soon return to normal, but when you wake up, your condition is exactly the same.

When you break your arm, develop a cataract or begin to lose your memory, life as you know it changes. It’s harder to exercise, to cook a meal, write a thank-you note. You need to rely on others because you have no other choice. Acknowledging this helped me through my recovery. I accepted that I had a serious injury that would be around for a while, and I understood that this injury would impact me less if I relied on my family to help me and stopped wallowing in self-pity. I gradually began to move past my injury, and I hope my grandparents do the same.