In February 1985 I was about half-way through seventh grade at Central Junior High School in Superior. It was a week away from my 13th birthday and life was good — well, as good as it gets for a 12-year-old girl.
It was Valentine’s week at school; a week in which you always tried to look your best. You never knew who was going to send you any kind of Valentine and you didn’t want to disappoint. I had picked out the perfect outfit, but didn’t have shoes to match so I borrowed a pair from a neighbor girl a couple years older than I was. They matched perfectly, but were a bit too big. Who cares, right? I was going to wear them anyway! I needed those shoes to complete my ensemble that day.
The day was moving along quite well and I remember leaving English class and heading down the stairwell to my locker. The next thing I remember is being helped up from the stairwell landing and my right hand hanging awkwardly from my arm. There was no pain. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t bleeding. I was just broken. Errrr…a part of me was broken. And swelling. Fast.
Someone — I don’t know who — grabbed my books and carried them and another student helped me to the nurse’s office. I remember the school nurse calling my grandmother to bring me to the hospital because my mother was "so far away." (We lived about 20 miles out of town.) Mom would be meeting us at the emergency room.
There’s not a whole lot I remember from the rest of that day. I can see my grandparents’ car parked in front of the school. I remember walking down the front stairs, past the giant bust of James Hill* and into their car. And then I remember waking up and our neighbor was in my hospital room asking me how I was feeling and telling me my mom had just gone to get some coffee. And there was a plaster cast on my arm. Wha?
Both bones in my wrist broke when I put my hand out to break my fall. Yes, only one hand. You see, I had my books in my left and I couldn’t let them drop! But those bones didn’t just break. Oh no! They broke at a slant and wouldn’t stay set, no matter how many times those docs pulled and pulled. Thankfully, I was so pumped full of drugs I don’t remember that process.
When Mom returned she explained to me I had surgery to put pins into my bones to hold them in place until they healed. I’d need to stay in the hospital overnight, but I could go home the next morning. And she gave me permission to go back to sleep. So I did. Now that I’m a mom, I’ve realized there’s a very good chance my mother did not sleep at all that night.
Once at home we had to rig up a hook in the ceiling, tie a rope to my arm and loop it around the hook to hold my arm up above my head — at all times. There had been so much swelling that the pain was unbearable; elevating it 24-hours a day helped, but the drugs helped more.
I spent my 14th birthday tied to the ceiling in my bedroom with a cast on my arm that weighed at least 15 pounds. I have a three-inch Frankenstein scar on my wrist from the surgery and I’ve lost quite a bit of my range of motion. I’ve developed arthritis in that wrist and it can be difficult to do things some days. But it could have been worse. It could have been my head that hit that marble landing. I could have been another tragic victim of a traumatic brain injury. Coulda…coulda…coulda.
I also coulda kicked some major ass when I found out I didn’t slip on those stairs, like I had believed for so many years. I believed I slipped because the shoes I was wearing were too big for my feet. My mother even told me as much: "Those shoes you were wearing were way too big for you! You could have been hurt even worse!" I lived with that guilt for so many years.
But then, not many years after graduation, a former classmate of mine asked me if I remembered when I fell down the stairs. How could I not? It was the most traumatic event of my past! I thought he was just remembering it as though we remember the day when So-and-so slipped in the gravy that was on the lunchroom floor or the day So-and-so fell asleep at his desk and Mr. Biology slammed his book down on the table to wake him up. Instead, former classmate says to me, "Yeah, you didn’t slip. I tripped you. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha."
!!!!!!!
So thank you for coming clean, Former Classmate. I only wish that on both the day you tripped me and the day you confessed that you would have realized how far an apology would have gone.
* James Hill was the founder of the Great Northern Railway. It would have made more sense [to me] for that bust to be of President Calvin Coolidge since Coolidge used Central Junior High School as the "Summer White House" while president.
