Of Flying Flops and Fractured Femurs

A cautionary tale of a boy who broke his leg... trick-or-treating.

Twenty-two years ago today, I was laying on a couch. All day long. All 24 hours of it.

Was I exhausted from a rigorous trick-or-treating through our expansive neighborhood? Was I sick from gorging on the candy bonanza I'd collected? Was I, typically as rambunctious as any 12-year-old boy, just that damn lazy that day?

None of the above.

I had broken my leg. Trick-or-treating.

I was out that night making the rounds with my friend Rick. We had pretty much canvassed the neighborhood and were about to round the corner to go back onto my street, where mine was the third house down on the right...

So we walked up the driveway of one of the last homes on our tour. We rang the doorbell, did the spiel, got the candy. Rick goes back the way we came, but I, in my unfettered glee, in my giddiness over the prospect of the imminent consumption of copious quantities of sugar, in the euphoric spirit that one can only possess being a child left free to wander and bearing no responsibility but to have fun... (and maybe because I was in a hurry to avoid the older kids roaming about who were committing the heinous act of snatching our precious booty from us)...

I took off running across their front yard, back towards the street.

Problem was, this front yard featured a four-foot-high retaining wall that I either a) didn't realize was there or b) was too caught up in the abovementioned emotional rush to remember. Soon I felt a disturbing presence under my feet...

Air. Not ground.

Unfortunately, I was not airborne nearly long enough to collect my thoughts so as to make anything nearly resembling a proper landing, and I definitely do not possess any feline instincts. Instead, I thudded to the ground with my left leg bent under me.

I sat up, but quickly realized I couldn't stand up. I informed Rick of my condition and he just kind of looked at me. I pleaded with him to go get my parents, and he thought I was kidding. Nope. This was no trick, and it definitely wasn't a treat.

Once convinced, Rick took off, though at a pace best described as "leisurely." I just laid there for what seemed an eternity (probably about 20 minutes). Other kids passed by and just stared. I cursed them silently with my returned stare.

Finally, my parents arrived... thank God they brought the car. To this point, I hadn't hurt. It was just numb. Then, they picked me up to put me in the backseat.

PAIN.

I yelped like a thousand scolded puppies. Through the course of this ordeal, it remained like that-- so long as I was still I didn't hurt much, but move it... OWWWWWWW.

I was carried into our house and deposited on the sofa in the living room. It was a Saturday night. Rick stayed over but departed in the morning. Sometime around mid-afternoon Sunday my dad tried to stand me up. Right. Lucky he didn't do more damage!

Now if this had been my child, I would have called 911 and asked for an ambulance as soon as we got home. But no, no action was taken that night. Nor the next day. My dad was convinced it was merely a sprain or strain... funny, I didn't think that one of those would render the limb IMMOBILE.

Finally, on Monday morning, I was placed on an unhinged door and slid into the back of my dad's station wagon. It was in this manner that I was carried into the doctor's office. They did X-rays. They confirmed what I suspected but my parents, gosh, they were surprised.

I had fractured my left femur. Actually, I had all but shattered it. It was not the common horizontal break-- no, not me. I had to be an orthopedic anomaly and get a long vertical fracture that ran from mid-thigh down almost to my knee.

I was carried into the hospital still on door (the staff praised my father's ingenuity). My mom, likely out of guilt at this point, got me not only a private room, but a VIP suite. I got a microwave and stocked snacks. Not that I could use them myself, of course. The whole utter dependency deal got old real fast...

So there I was, carried from door to gurney, from gurney to hospital bed. Each transition did indeed, as they warned, HURT. Then they started slipping something under my leg. Something involving rope and pulleys.

Traction.

They elevated my leg about three feet high (at the foot) due to the fact that my thigh was twice its normal size, and nothing could be done until the swelling went down. That lasted three days. Three fantastic days of just laying there. I watched a lot of TV, learned to pee in a bottle, and played with my automatically adjustable bed (hey, I’m easily amused).

I believe it was Friday morning that I was scheduled for the OR. They weren’t planning to actually operate, but I was to be given full anaesthia due to the fact that they had to “set” the bone, i.e. get it back into its proper position. This is achieved, or so the nurse told me, essentially by grabbing you by the foot and yanking really hard. I was made blissfully aware of how much I did not want to experience the sensation.

A nurse came in to give me my “happy shot” right in the butt—apparently designed to relax you—and then slipped in the IV. “This is going to feel like a big stick,” she said. No shit. But after the initial prick it didn’t really bother me. I just looked over and thought, Hey, there’s this big stick in my arm. Cool.

They wheeled me down to OR. I can’t remember exactly how the an—was administered, but they told me to count down from 100. “100, 99, 98, 97…” and then I opened my eyes to a completely different room. It’s just a strange sensation that’s hard to explain if you haven’t gone through it. Not like sleep, when your subconscious is still working. You completely miss the time. To your brain, it didn’t pass.

I woke up in the recovery room and eventually got wheeled back up to my room. The IV was still in my arm, although the bag was empty. I politely informed a nurse of this fact and she said, “Oh! We can take that out now.” Nice to be on top of these things.

I had not been allowed to eat or drink since midnight, and I was tremendously thirsty. I begged for someone to just bring me “anything.” As it turned out, my aunt bought a Minute Maid Orange Soda out of the Coke machine down the hall.  It was a new product at the time and I’d never had one before. At that moment, it was the best thing I’d ever tasted, and I have a lasting affinity for it to this day. (Apparently, from my observations at WOCCA, so do most people from India. Go figure).

After another day they started getting me out of bed. First just getting out, having feet touch the floor, was a triumph. Slowly each time I moved another foot or so. It was almost like learning to walk all over again. My doctor thought that the nature of the injury was not conducive to crutches, so I was instead given a walker. Yes, like the old folks use, a walker.

I went through physical therapy (exercising) and occupational therapy (learning how to do everyday things in your condition). Finally, after a nine-day stay, I got to leave the hospital and go home.

My stay at home would last three months; I would miss the entire months of November, December, and January from school. I had a homebound teacher who came two or three times a week though, so I stayed caught up. My sister-in-law would bring my niece and nephew over for a few hours a day during the week to stay with me while both my parents were at work. (My mom raised four boys, of which I was the last, and had stayed at home most of that time. I practically begged her to go back to work when I was 10. Even at that age, I craved time by myself).

So it went, through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. I appreciated the sympathy at first, but I got tired of the pity (my grandmother was the biggest offender there). I was still the rambunctious 12-year-old and managed to break my cast—twice. At some point in January they took off the hard plaster cast and replaced it with a “soft cast” that involved some sort of wet bandages they wrapped around a cloth brace; the bandages then dried-hardened. Soon after that I was cleared to go back to school, and luckily for me still got to go on the Patrol trip to Washington, D.C. in March.

Thus is the tale of a boy who broke his leg trick-or-treating. May it be a lesson to you, not to let candy go to your head—or run in the dark over unknown ground!