I was seven years old when I broke my left arm, on the 24th of July, 1963. I was 39 years old when I broke my right arm, almost exactly 32 years later.
The first time we were up at the cabin, and it was Pioneer day. My brothers and sisters and cousins and I had put on a little pioneer parade for our parents, complete with costumes. Afterwords my cousin and I were playing on a metal trailer when I tripped over the long skirt I was wearing and fell off. The tongue of the trailer crashed down on my arm, breaking it in two. It was quite the experience, but I've written about it on this blog before, so you don't need to hear it again.
The second time it was two days after Pioneer day, we were home, and I was stenciling Alyssa's bedroom with black puppy dog paw prints. I'd painted the prints everywhere, making it look like a puppy had walked in black ink and then ran up and down her walls, even onto the roof. Alyssa was 11, and we were just finishing redecorating her bedroom in black and white. It was really cute.
I had been working on the room all morning with Kami, my two month old baby, happily sitting in her little wind-up swing, watching me. I'd just about finished painting the paw prints, but decided it would look neat if a couple of them actually extended up onto the ceiling.
“I should go get the step ladder to do this,” I thought as I tried to reach up high enough to stipple the paint on with my brush, but I was tired and really just wanted to be done. The ladder was out in the shop. It would be a pain to carry it in through the back door, and even harder to maneuver it down the stairs, and I really didn't want to waste the time for just a couple of paw prints.
“I bet can reach the ceiling if I just stand on this chair,” I thought, gingerly climbing up on a folding chair I'd taken down into Alyssa's bedroom earlier that morning. It was the old fashioned kind, with a wooden seat that swung up to collapse, down to sit on.
Holding my paper plate pallet covered with black paint in my teeth, I reached up onto the ceiling and taped on the paw print stencil. Then carefully, steadying myself with one hand on the ceiling, I picked up my stencil brush, dabbed it into the paint on the plate, and began pounding the black paint onto the ceiling. It was kind of awkward, but I could do it. Leaning forward a little bit, I reached to stencil the second paw print, but that tiny shift of weight pushed my forward foot closer to the back of the chair, and it started to collapse. I seemed to fall in slow motion, tipping over the back of the chair, grabbing for something that wasn't there to steady myself, twisting my body to the side so I would fall that direction and not straight forward onto the baby, and throwing out my right arm to stop my fall as I crashed to the floor.
“Dumb!” I thought as I hit the floor and lay still for a second before carefully rolling over onto my my side to get up. “I should never have tried to stand on that stupid collapsible chair!”
Thank goodness I had missed hitting the baby swing and Kami was safe. Thank goodness the paper plate full of paint had landed right side up on the carpet, and there hadn't been much paint left on it anyway, so I hadn't made too big a mess. Thank goodness the stencil brush was almost dry and it hadn't flung paint everywhere.
I reached for the brush, then realized that my right arm hurt like the dickens. “Darn, darn, darn,!” I muttered under my breath. “Surely I can't have broken it!”
“Mom,” what happened Alyssa exclaimed as she ran into her bedroom. Obviously she'd heard me fall and come running.
“Oh, I just fell off the chair,” I told her, laughing a little self-consciously.
“Are you hurt?” she asked in concern. She wasn't used to seeing me sitting on the floor, holding my arm, almost crying.
“No, I'm fine,” I assured her, trying to stand up, but finding it harder than you might imagine since I was still a little shaky and I couldn't use my right arm to push or pull myself up.
“Why did you fall?” Alyssa wanted to know, but I really didn't feel like explaining the situation to her. “Honey, can you get Kami out of the swing and carry her upstairs for me?” I asked instead. “I think I'm done painting for today.”
Upstairs I sat down on the couch and took a couple of deep breaths. My arm really hurt, and I was beginning to suspect it was more than just bruised.
Alyssa brought Kami upstairs, then hovered over me, looking worried. “Mom, you look like you don't feel very good. I'm going to go get grandma,” she told me.
I didn't stop her. The truth was, I didn't feel very good. Alyssa found mom on her side of the house and brought her back over to our living room.
“Alyssa says you fell down,” she said as soon as she saw me. “Are you hurt?”
“I don't know,” I told her, feeling even more foolish than before. “I fell off a chair onto my arm, and it kind of feels like it might be broken.”
There really wasn't anything to see, not like the first time I broke my arm. Then the bone had been sticking up at a funny angle, and everyone had known it was broken. This time my arm looked perfectly fine, it just hurt like the dickens.
“Maybe you'd better call the doctors and go down and have them look at it,” mom suggested.
I called my doctor and explained what had happened, but they were pretty unexcited over the phone. “Bones don't usually break just from falling on them,” the nurse told me, “but the doctor says to come on down and he'll x-ray it for you if you want him to.”
I left the rest of the kids with mom, but took Kami with me in her baby carrier. It was one of those kinds that snap into a base already strapped into the car, so it wasn't too hard to get it in and out of the car, and I carried it with my left hand. I felt kind of foolish, sitting in the waiting room, but Kami was a good girl and slept most of the time, so I just sat by her and wondered how I could explain my accident without sounding like a total idiot. Telling people I'd fallen off a chair didn't sound very sophisticated.
When they finally worked me in I had to lay my arm on a flat bed so the tech could X-ray it. Just having him arrange it in the right spot hurt.
“I'm sorry,” the doctor told me when he finally got the X-ray developed and I was called back to a room to see him. “I really didn't think your arm would be broken, but it is. It's a clean break, but it's all the way through and I'm afraid it's going to hurt for awhile.”
I was just as glad that it was broken. I'd have felt even stupider if it hadn't been and I'd just been complaining for nothing. The doctor put a cast on, gave me some instructions, and eventually sent me home. “It's going to hurt for awhile,” he warned me as I was leaving. “Try to keep it iced to keep the swelling down, and take the pain medication when you need it.”
I did. My arm hurt! By that evening it felt like the cast was three sizes too small, and I was grumpy and irritable and not a happy camper. Most of all, I felt just plain stupid. How had I been so dumb as to stand on a folding chair in the first place? How was I going to take care of a two month old baby with only one hand, especially just my left one. How was I going to fix my hair, put on my make-up, or take a shower? How could I put roll on deodorant under my left arm using my left hand?
Eventually I figured everything out. First of all, I changed to spray deodorant. Second, I got the kids or Moe to help me change Kami's diapers, especially the poopy ones, to mix her bottles, and even to feed her until my arm stopped hurting enough so I could rest her on my cast and feed her with my left hand.
It seemed like my arm ached and ached, way to much, for the first few days, but eventually the swelling went down and I got used to the cast. In the meantime, all the kids and their friends signed it and wrote me messages. They had fun doing that.
Alyssa's paw prints never did get painted past the first two on her ceiling, so it always kind of looked like a little puppy ran that far, then fell off or something, but it still looked cute. I learned my lesson about standing on folding chairs. From then on, if I was too lazy to drag a ladder over to whatever project I was working on, I made sure I stood on a bed, or a table, or the kitchen counter or something stable like that. I can't say it stopped me from painting on my walls, but it did make me more cautious.
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