A broken wrist

Have you ever broken a bone?

When I was around seven years old my mom left me and my brother with my grandma. At least I think I was seven. She needed to run some errands and grandma was happy to babysit us. I will not say that I was a terrible child, because I really think I wasn’t. But we took an interest in playing, exploring and doing daring things. That day wasn’t different. It left me with a broken wrist and a story to tell.

Climbing to the roof

My brother and I decided to climb to the roof of my uncle’s house. I really don’t remember if it was with my grandma’s consent, but most likely, it was not. This house was next to my grandma’s. For this we got a chair from the kitchen to help us accomplish the act. To be fair, the roof wasn’t very high. The proof is that we children were able to reach it only with the help of a chair.

The fall

I remember going up and down several times that day, until that one last time that I fell. You see, I don’t know if it was instinct. The thing is that I probably tried to cushion the fall with my left hand. After that it was mayhem. I was screaming, my grandma was screaming, and probably even my brother. To calm me down my grandma put me to sleep. After I woke up I still wanted to play, and she only allowed us to go the sandbox. I knew then that there was something wrong with my left wrist. I was capable of pushing the tools with my right hand, but not with the left.

Getting a plaster cast

I went to the doctor and got a plaster cast. Of course, I didn’t like it at the beginning. The bright side was that I got all my friends at school asking me how I got it. I told the story on how I tried to climb the roof and fell, which they heard with excitement. They all wanted to sign the cast and treated me like a hero afterwards. It made me popular at school, so something good came out of it.

Will the doctor need to break it again?

On hot days it was itchy as hell. I tried to scratch my arm with a wooden stick to the despair of my mom. She told me that I couldn’t be moving my arm, otherwise the bone would set in the wrong position. They would need to break it again to put it in the right position, and that would be painful. Although that made a fearful impression in me, I still tried to scratch it when my mom wasn’t looking. I was genuinely surprised when the doctor took another x-ray and said that everything was in order.

A series of unfortunate events

If you consider the series of unfortunate events, on the whole that wasn’t a very good experience for me. First, the fall, then, the numbness on the wrist indicating it was broken. After that, the initial shame of wearing a cast and itchiness that I felt on hot days. But the cherry on the top of the cake was still to come. They used some kind of electric saw to open it. This scared me a whole lot more. I thought the nurse could let it slip and saw my arm in two. I actually pictured the bloodbath that would be in that emergency room.

So, there you have it, why I’m afraid of heights. That was the first and only bone I broke in my life. They say that fear is a mechanism of survival, and I think that it worked for me. I didn’t want to experience something like that again. That broken wrist surely made me much more careful in the future.