Mel had surgery today. He fell while playing basketball and broke his wrist. I should have known immediately that it was broken by the eerily calm voice he had when he called me. By the second call, he thought it was broken. By the third call (in three minutes), I knew it was broken. I was only 5 minutes away from him and I couldn’t get there fast enough. For him or me.
I didn’t even look at his arm when I picked him up. He was sure he needed a hospital and I wasn’t sure if I could handle it. Turns out, I could, but it was sickening at first. His wrist was kind of “s” shaped. Not as bad as it could have been, but bad enough. He won’t be playing basketball for a while.
The splinted him at the E.R. and we had to wait for a few days to get an appointment at the ortho since he broke it on a Friday night. While other kids are at football games or hanging out, Mel was at the Y shooting hoops. I guess it could be worse right?
So we went to the doctor on Tuesday and by Wednesday morning he was getting it fixed. The fix required two pins to be placed in his wrist for the next few weeks and then they will be removed and he will be in a cast for a few more weeks. No physical therapy should be required, though it will take a bit for him to get his muscle tone back after not using his wrist for 2 months.
I guess I’m not doing too bad since this is the first break in the 25 years since I’ve had kids. I think my oldest son maybe broke a toe, but nothing that ever required a cast that I can remember and definitely nothing that required surgery. The surgery is the hardest thing. Not really the surgery itself, but the moments leading up to the surgery and the waiting for the doctor to come tell you everything went fine. I’m sure I can’t be the only one who stresses out about this. I stress out when I have to be put to sleep. I always think I’m going to die. This is the 3rd time in his life that Mel had to be anesthetized and it is traumatic as fuck. For me… not him. He does well with it. I start imagining the worst case scenario all the way down to every detail. The doctor comes out. Tells me something went wrong. And then I see every moment of my life from planning the funeral to the days that follow to pretending to be OK and then I tell myself to stop thinking like that because I’m going to manifest exactly that and so I stop until it starts again and it’s like the whole thing is on a continuous loop and I’m sick to my stomach and anxiety riddled. And then the doctor comes out and says everything is fine and then I sit and think about how foolish I was to even be dreading it. It’s crazy. Maybe I am the only one. Maybe it’s my vivid imagination. Maybe it’s my anxiety. Either way, he came out of everything alive which is all I’m concerned about. They could have accidentally cut his arm off and I would have just been happy he was OK.
He, on the other hand, is slightly miserable. He’s on drugs for pain. He’s insisting on going to school tomorrow to take a test even though he can’t go to school on narcotics he is sure that missing his English test will be far worse than taking it all doped up. I may not give him any medicine and let him take the test. But then taking a test in pain may be just as bad. Who knows. But I won’t complain because last year I couldn’t have paid him to give a shit about his grades so this school is doing something right. The school he went to last year didn’t care one way or the other. It was really discouraging.
Anyway, all’s well that ends well. He’s out for the season, but it could have been worse. I won’t list the reasons, I’m sure you can come up with your own. Until tomorrow…
RouletteWeekend 