I feel old...

Why is it my husband has a birthday and I am the one who feels old?

My darling Franz turned 31 yesterday. I baked him a yellow cake with two different types of chocolate frosting, got him an Alton Brown book and a card, and took him out to dinner at Ring Side Steakhouse. It was really good... and they even brought him a surprise birthday dessert!

Today we went out with our friends, Douglas and Kristina. They brought Franz a special Scrabble scoring book so he can now keep track of all of his games on nice paper and in a snazzy binder. I thought it was adorable! They also were kind enough to share their Chinook Book 2 for 1 coupons with us so we could all go roller skating together at Oaks Amusement Park.

Now, I have a long and extensively intense history with roller skating. It was one of my three primary childhood obsessions. It went like this:

1) Roller skating (including, but not limited to, speed skating and dancing while skating).
2) Bike riding (including, but not limited to, jumping over things whenever possible and speed dismounts that would make my mother hold her breath and shake her head).
3) Tree climbing (including, but not limited to, hanging upside down as much as possible and swinging from ropes when they were available.)

At one point, I even managed to briefly tie a bike to a rope tree swing and ride a "flying bike". Creativity, thy name is "kid".

The injuries sustained from these obsessions were numerous, and have left multiple scars upon my body that, in some cases, are still more than a little noticible today. But the worst of these injuries, by far, was sustained while roller skating.

I loved speed skating. As a child, the faster I could go, the happier I was. I pushed horses as hard as I could when riding them. I pushed my legs as hard as I could while pedaling bikes. I swung as high as I could on swings. Once, when we went out on my Uncle Tom's boat, the only time I was really excited was when we were going as fast as we could... the rest of the time, bobbing around on the wakes of other boats, was dull by comparison.

I tell you this so you will know that I loved to go fast.

My mother, knowing this about me, and no doubt wanting us kids to wear ourselves out as much as possible on the weekends, took us to the skating rink every Saturday. I loved it. I couldn't get enough of it. I wanted to live on skates. I was so excited once when I saw an episiode of CHiPs that had a woman who got away from robberies by popping wheels out of her sneakers and skating away that I almost died... I wanted those shoes SO bad!!!

So every Saturday, I would practice going as fast as I could. My Mom would always let me rent the speed skates. They had bigger, chunkier wheels than the other skates, and their boots only went up to the ankle to allow for more flexibility. I could skate backwards and forwards, do spins and twists... all of that stuff. Until one fateful day...

It was a day like any other. The only exception to this was the fact that on this day (and to my memory, only on this day) my father came to the rink to watch us skate as well. Maybe it was the extra excitement, the extra "wanting to impress"... but I slipped up and it cost me big time. I had been skating for a few hours at that point, and my polyurethane wheels were quite warm by then. That particular material gets a little sticky when you have been going for a while, which is good because you can hold on to corners better. It is bad for if you accidentally let the wheels of one boot get too close to the wheels of the other boot while crossing a leg over to turn. Sticky sticks to sticky... and the wheels that once went round and round stop abruptly. And as we all remember from physics class, "Objects in motion tend to stay in motion." My skates stopped and the rest of me kept going. It was incredibly sudden and I had no time to react. I must have put my right arm out at some point, because I landed hard on it and twisted away from it as I rolled. It didn't hurt. I was more surprised than anything else. In fact, it took a few moments as I was laying on the floor of the rink for me to clear my mind enough to figure out why I was even on the floor to begin with!

I started to push up from my back to rise to (at least) a sitting position, and something in my head said, "Don't do it." So I thought, "Well, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to lay here for a second." I turned my head to the right to look at the oncoming skaters and make sure no one was about to hit me. Then I saw my skating buddy (whose name escapes me at the moment), he was a full grown man, a big lumbering ex-Marine. Nowadays, if I were my Mom, I would have had big time suspicions about a grown man who liked to skate around with 10 year old girls, trying to teach them how to do turns and spins, etc. But, it was a more innocent time then, I suppose. Anyway, he was skating up to me with a worried look on his face, looking at my right arm. I looked down at it to see what he was upset about. That was when I saw it for the first time... my arm was broken, pretty badly. I was laying with the back on my hand resting on the floor and my arm was bent into a "V" shape above it. Consequently, my wrist was a good 4-5 inches closer to my elbow than it would have been if my arm was straight. I absurdly thought that it looked like I had made myself another elbow... one that bent in the opposite direction from the original. My second thought was that it was a good thing I hadn't tried to use my hands to push myself up... I could have ended up with my wrist and my "first" elbow touching. Not good.

About this time, my Marine was kneeling beside me telling me everything was going to be okay. He was trying to stay calm, so as not to scare the kid, but I just looked at him and said, "Have you SEEN my arm?! That doesn't look very good. I think we are going to have to call an ambulance." He had untucked his white T-shirt and was covering my arm with the bottom of it. I looked at him, probably somewhat incredulously, and said "What are you doing?" He said, "I don't want you to see it, you might go into shock." I said, "I already saw it!! I think we are going to have to get an ambulance." I think I thought that no one else but him was going to be able to go and get help. I started twisting my head around looking for my Mom between the booted feet of the onlookers that were gathering around me. Maybe she would get someone to call an ambulance. I saw her just as she realized it was me that had everyone so interested in one spot on the floor. And then she did one of the Top 10 Most Surprising Things I Have Ever Seen My Mother Do... she jumped the carpeted wall between the seating area and the rink.

Now, this was no small thing, because I had been told about a million times to stop jumping over the wall with my skates on. In fact, not to do it without my skates on. Just never jump over the wall period. It was forbidden. And there was my Mom, all hellfire and full of Mommy-protective-ness... jumping it like it was nothing. She was by my side in a flash... people seemed to magically part for her like the Red Sea.

She didn't see the arm, because my Marine (Mike? Ed? Frank?) was still covering it with his T-shirt. She said, "What happened?" He said, "It's bad." And she cocked an eyebrow at him and repeated with a bit more edge in her voice, "What happened?" I was about to look over at him to tell him that he better tell her, because he was about to get in trouble (I knew what that face meant) but then I saw her face change. He must have lifted the shirt. I decided to humor him and not look at it again. I was too fascinated by the look on my Mom's face. She went through about 20 different emotions in the space of two seconds... there was horror, fear, anger, sadness, loss, pain and heartache... all on top of each other. Then a smooth wall came down over her features and she calmed to the point of almost eerie stillness. She looked at me then and said, "I think we are going to have to call an ambulance." I said, "That's what I keep saying."

As she had turned to talk to my father, I looked at all the people gathered around in a little oval around our spectacle. A recent addition to the group was a woman standing at my head, so I could just barely see her. When my Marine had uncovered my arm for my Mom, she saw it too. I am not sure if I registered a collective gasp from everyone, but I sure remember her screaming. She was totally freaking out. I was craning my neck, trying to look above me, saying "What's wrong with that lady? Is she okay?" Some people took her away, though. I was glad for it because I didn't like it for the grown ups to be freaking out. I started trying to tell everyone that it was okay, that it didn't hurt, and that they could go back to skating if they would just go around us when they went by. But, by this time they had turned off the music, and put up the lights and were asking people over the loudspeakers to please leave the floor. I felt so embarrassed. I knew that there was no way they could move me like this, but I didn't want to make everyone else stop having fun. The Marine said not to worry about it, and that most of the older folks could probably use a break anyway.

So, I laid there looking up at the flourescent lights... one white and one blue... waiting for the ambulance that they said was coming. I told the Marine that he didn't have to cover up my arm anymore, but he seemed to be happy to have something to do to help. So, we sat there talking. I told them they were going to have to take off my skates, because they were rentals. I forgot to tell them I had hidden two quarters for playing Mrs. Pac Man in them, so I lost those. In the mean time, I was asking Mom if there was anything I should be doing. My Dad said, "When they get here, I'm going to go to the office." I remember being absolutely flabbergasted by this, but strangely not that surprised. I thought he was saying that he was going to go to work. My mind was screaming, "I can't believe he is going to leave us and go to work!!" Another part of my mind was saying, "Figures. You screwed up skating and now he doesn't have a reason to watch us anymore." I looked up at my Mom, confused as could be, and said, "He going to work?!?!" She said, "No honey, he is going to go to the office in the hospital, to get all the paperwork taken care of." Oh, I thought, whew.

The paramedics came, and they were all friendly and matter of fact. Trying to ascertain whether or not I had lost consciousness. I told them I had been looking up at the same blue and white lights all the whole time I had been laying there. I remember the female paramedic looking up to check that they were, in fact, blue and white. I remember thinking, "Why would I lie about something like that?" They asked so many questions that I was getting frustrated. I wanted to get up off the floor so that other people could go back to skating, and I wanted to get to the hospital ASAP so that they could fix my arm. I looked at the paramedic closest to me and asked him, in all seriousness, "Could we just go to the hospital and I can answer everything on the way?" They seemed to think this was pretty funny coming from a 10 year old. That just pissed me off more. I remember thinking, "Everybody wants to protect the kid... don't let her look at the arm, ask her ten million pointless questions about lights and how many fingers, act like everything is okay... but nobody actually wants to take me to the stupid hospital!!"

About the time I was contemplating throwing a fit, they brought up the stretcher and the splint and a bunch of guaze to wrap everything with. I remember thinking it was weird to use that much gauze when I wasn't even bleeding. They explained they were going to try to immobilize everything as best they could, but it might still hurt. I told them that nothing hurt, and I was fine. They wrapped me up, and away we went. I remember my Mom's purse brushing against my leg as we walked out. I remember a few people applauding as we left... I felt so bad that they were probably so upset at us for stopping their skating for so long that they felt the need to applaud our leaving. As a grown up, I think now they were probably trying to clap the equivalent of "get well soon" or "buck up there, little trooper."

We got to do the siren on the way to the hospital. The paramedic talked with me about who I liked musically, the only answer any self respecting kid could give back then was Michael Jackson. She asked me if I had Thriller yet, and I did... on tape. We hit a bump on the way there, and it jolted my arm pretty good. That actually did hurt... and it drew the only tear I cried the whole time throughout this whole fiasco.

As it turned out, I had a compund fracture of the radius and ulna bones of my right forearm. It was such a weird break that my pediatric orthopedist ended up doing a medical journal paper on it. He was in surgery when I was brought in to the ER, and they were trying to wait for him before they set it. But the bones were 3 mm away from coming through the skin, and were also blocking several major blood vessels in my forearm. They came in every so often and poked my fingers with needles, and I was gradually losing feeling in them. When it was decided they couldn't wait for the surgeon anymore, they had a resident and an orderly take me into another room. They cautioned me very strongly not to move. They told me what they were about to do would be like trying to balance two toothpicks on top of each other by their tips and it was going to be tricky, at the very least. Then the orderly held down my upper arm, and the resident yanked up on my fingers and pulled everything straight. I don't remember if it hurt or not. I remember being glad that they were finally doing something. Then a nurse wrapped everything with a temporary cast, while the orderly and the resident held my arm in place.

They took an x-ray after the temporary cast was on and determined that the bones were about 13% off. Which is not bad... not terrible, just not perfect. They sent us home telling us that the balancing act my bones were doing was a tricky one. They said I might feel a "pop" at some point in the next few days, and that it could be a good pop or a bad pop. But, either way, I would have an appointment set up with Dr. Price (the guy that had been in surgery all that time) on Monday and they would put me in a permanent cast. If it had been a bad pop, though... I would have to have surgery to set my bones using pins before they put the cast on. I was really hoping for either no pops, or good pops.

The pop came that night while we were eating dinner. My Mom had made me the traditional "somebody isn't feeling so good" sickie meal... hot dogs and apple sauce. I was concentrating on spearing things with my fork using my left hand, and I felt the pop. I gasped and looked up at everyone. They all sort of froze and looked at me. I said, "It popped. I sure hope it was good one." I remember Mom and Dad looking at each other and not saying anything. Looking back, I think now they were probably thinking about the dollars that would be gone if it had popped "bad". Surgery is never cheap.

We went to the doc on Monday, and luckily, it had been a good pop... down to just 3% off. Nowadays, you have to be looking at it really hard to tell, and even then most people can't. As scary as it was, I was incredibly lucky.

So, back to today. It has been about 15 years since I have been on skates at a roller rink. I was so disappointed at how much grace and agility I have lost in those years. I was skating just like the grown ups used to skate when I was a kid.... full of fear of falling and with arms out to catch myself. I did mange to get up to going a little bit fast for a few brief moments, but managed to cross one foot over the other on turns only a handful of times... all the while the past looming large in my mind.

Will I go back? Probably. It's pretty good exercise (as my feet, knees and lower back will scream to anyone who feels like listening) and it is still pretty fun. It makes me feel old, clumsy and out of shape... but it is fun, nonetheless.

Will I ever be able to really "go back"? Probably not. There is something to be said for being a fearless kid, who loves to hang upside down from trees and jump over things with my bike. If you never know what can happen, and how much it will hurt, you just don't think of falling. I wish I was young again.

I wish I could make myself not be afraid to fall.

***

Hope everyone out there is having a good night!

Love to all,

Sherry