Tragedy Strikes Again!

CRACK! As soon as I heard the noise I knew something was not right. It was 9:00 p.m. July 6, 2015, the night before my 9th birthday. We had just gotten home from Grand Haven and we were all exhausted! The bright, golden sunlight flooded throughout my entire house. There was a cool breeze that blew through all the slightly cracked windows, and the birds flying through my neighborhood at sunset chirped in the distance. You could hear the older neighborhood kids playing basketball at my neighbors house, and the smell of summer was in the air. My dad and I were in the living room playing some games while my two brothers and my mom got ready to go to bed. Somehow during the game, I ended up rolling over my own arm while it was backwards, and that's when we heard the horrendous noise. 

There are two kinds of people in this world, those who get injured all the time, and those who watch everyone around them get injured all the time. Unfortunately, I am the first kind of person. 

“OH NO!” I grasped onto my arm immediately. Numbness flooded from my fingertips to my shoulder. It felt as if my arm had fallen asleep. From all the stories I’ve heard of people breaking bones, never once did they say their limb went numb.

“What happened?” my mom asked as she came running down the stairs. Both my mom and my dad looked at my arm and noticed that something didn’t look quite right. 

“Do we need to go to the hospital?” I asked nervously.

“Yes,” they both said in unison. 

As we were on our way to the hospital, everything was a blur. It was almost dark by this time. As we reached downtown, lights from all the tall buildings lit up the dark and starry night sky. It was a busy night, and there were many cars speeding past us creating a lot of fast moving lights flashing through the car windows. 

Fast forward two hours. It was now 11:30 p.m. and I was staring at the small TV in the corner of the room. My favorite movies were playing on repeat with all the bright hospital lights surrounding me. I was waiting for my x-ray results. The hospital was pretty busy that night, so it was going to be a couple more hours until we got the results back. 

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” I looked up to see that the clock had reached midnight, and a ton of doctors were bursting into my room singing to me. All I wanted was a slushie, but at that time, I wasn’t allowed to have one. Instead of a slushie, they brought me some presents and a card. Even though it wasn’t ideal to be in the hospital on my birthday, all the doctors made it pretty bearable. 

“We have some bad news,” said the doctor as she walked into my room about an hour later. “You completely broke your arm in half and you dislocated the bone that you broke” I ended up having to get put under anesthesia for the surgery. When I woke up from the anesthesia, everything was weird. Since I was still loopy, everything looked all boxy. I looked down at my arm to see a giant splint that ran from my fingertips to my shoulder, and my arm was bent at about a ninety degree angle. There was no possible way I could move it, and I knew that there was going to be a long road ahead of me. 

All I wanted was to sleep. It was close to 4:00 a.m. and at this point, I was very tired, but they would not let me sleep. They couldn’t let me go home until I could stay awake and I could sit up. I kept closing my eyes and dozing off which kept adding more time I would have to stay there. After about an hour of dozing off, I finally decided that I was going to try to stay awake so I could go home. I tried over and over again, and it wasn’t going very well for a long time. It seemed nearly impossible, until finally, I stayed awake long enough to get discharged. 

From that point on, going to Grand Haven on July 6th has been thought of as unlucky to my family.