Epiphany & Co.

When I was nearly 8 years old I fell off the monkey bars on the "upper playground" of the "old" Uintah Elementary while chasing Chandler Bello in a game of tag.  I landed on my two outstretched arms (that's called a "FOOSH") and, subsequently, my face.  If memory serves, I briefly lost consciousness and awoke to rolling over on to my back and revealing that classic shot of kids in a circle peering down upon their fallen comrade.  I then did something which seems like a massive liability: I walked home without reporting to anyone at school.  My nose was bloodied and my arms seemed to weigh 100 pounds each and be twice as long as normal.  My mom just happened to be driving somewhere and picked me up halfway home and drove me to the "old" Primary Children's Hospital (sheesh, is nothing from this memory still around?).  A couple of x-rays later revealed 3 broken bones.  One side was both the ulna and radius, and the other was only one of those.  I don't remember which bone, and which arm was which.  Now, it just so happens that my grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon.  My mom wanted him to fix any broken bones in the family.  Unfortunately we waited 3 or 4 days to drive the 313 miles from SLC to Bloomington, UT and in that time my bones had "set" in their skeewampus new configuration.  My grandfather then informed me that he would need to "rebreak" my arms in order to re-reset them in their proper alignment.  Now here comes the part that has remained a mystery to me for more than 20 years.  (I'm so old that I can even make that comment)  My grandfather told me that the reason he was about to break my arms WITHOUT ANY ANESTHETIC was to avoid "shots."  At the time, this was brilliant rhetoric.  There is nothing quite so fearful to a 7-year old as the threat of somebody shoving a needle into you.  Especially to one who has never had their arm purposefully broken in cold blood.  He then proceeded, with the help of one or more uncles to hold me down, to break my arm with his bare (bear!) hands.  I practically have PTSD from this moment as I can still recall that moment of sheer, unadulterated pain.  Ever since then, I have thought that my grandfather had tricked me.  I thought that he meant to imply that rather than facing 30 seconds of excruciating bone-breaking, I could have had a series of shots that would somehow magically heal my broken arm.  I believed this all through a modern high school and college education, through medical school, and even most of the way through internship.  That is, until last weekend.  While helping to set a young boy's broken leg in the ER, we took mercy on the poor kid and gave him a whiff of propofol in his IV, a.k.a. conscious sedation.  We knocked the poor kid out, and then torqued on his leg like a couple of awkward tweens during a band-camp tug-o-war.  It hit me like a ton of anything (a ton of feathers and a ton of bricks both weigh the same amount, thank you very much!).  That's what my grandfather meant!  He wasn't deluding me!   Well, not entirely!  He meant that my options were to get a shot full of medicine to make the bone breaking less painful, or to just get on with the party.  EUREKA!!!  What a great feeling to make such a discovery.  I know how Columbus must have felt. 

 

Now if I could only figure out why I always played fullback in little league soccer...