Broken

*Ring ring ring.  It was April 1st of 2011.  I had just got a call from a friend named Kirk.  Kirk was my blonde friend with pale skin in my 6th grade class that was on the smaller side like me.  He enjoyed basketball and re-enacting military situations.  It was a sunny Sunday  in April and he called to ask if I wanted to go to his house and then go see a movie with him and his older brother Finn.  Finn was much like Kirk; he was blond  and liked to do military procedures, play with technology, and build forts.  I hadn’t gone to hang out with Kirk in a while, so I was looking forward to going to his house and then to a movie in Mckinleyville.  It was noon when I got to his house in Westhaven. Surrounded with massive redwoods, his house was modern with light colored wood floors with solar panels on the roof.  It was a while since I went to his house, so I was given a tour of the recently built forts he and his brother made out of redwood branches and old planks of wood in his backyard.  After the mini tour we watched the popular TV series Lost on Netflix.  It was the beginning of a good day.  

Tired of sitting down watching T.V. we wanted to do something active before we would sit down again for two hours at the movies.  Kirk has a basketball hoop, so what’s more active than some basketball? What I didn’t know was this active game of basketball would keep me from being active for eight weeks.  The adjustable basketball hoop was centered at the top of his small concrete driveway below his wooden deck.  We had set the basketball hoop so it would be 7 feet high. Perfect for dunking and making overall shots easier.  I was eager for a challenge though.  I was attempting long distance dunks.  The first try my jump was a little short.  The 2nd try I was short again, but 3rd time's the charm right? Kind of.  This time I was getting impatient. I was determined to successfully make the dunk.  I turned all my focus on the height and distance of my jump and the red hoop.  I gave myself a few meters to build up my speed before jumping.  I ran then leaped off of my left foot, extending my arm as far as I could toward the hoop.  Then I felt the cold metal hit my palm and the grippy brown ball leaving it.  Finally I made the shot.  With this done I could now walk away happily without the feeling of defeat, but I was wrong.

With all my focus on making the shot I neglected to think about what could go wrong.  There was a foot of a black plastic rectangle at a 45 degree angle going down from the base pole holding the plastic backboard and the metal rim.  My eye was only on the rim so I didn’t know I had to spread my feet so I wouldn’t land on it.  I came down on the angled plastic support with my left foot on it and my right foot on the concrete driveway.  The angle of the support made my left foot turn so the side of my foot was now on top.  The pain started to seep in.  I sat down quickly on the concrete holding my foot and rocking back and force to try to relieve the pain.  It felt like I had just twisted my ankle so the pain wasn’t that bad though.  Kirk requested we go inside and watch some more Lost.  I tried not to make a big deal out of my foot hurting, so I hopped on one foot up the stairs, to his front door behind him, so he wouldn’t see I wasn’t walking correctly.  Kirk went into his living room again set up Netflix on his Xbox that was linked up to his 40 inch flat screen T.V.  I went to the bathroom to see if there were any noticeable damage on my foot.  Pulling my white cotton Nike sock off on the soft striped carpet I noticed my foot had gone from a size 8 to a size 9.5.  Then the worry rushed in.  I couldn’t concentrate on one thing. My mind was racing.  Without real thought I went into the second living room where Kirk’s Brother Finn was sitting and using his black Apple iPad.  

“Is this normal?”  I asked Finn without any intention or control as I looked down at my foot.
“Mom!" Come here!”  Finn yelled worryingly.  Both Kirk and his mom, Ilza came in confused.
“Look at Kai’s foot.” Finn requested.  Surprised Ilza quickly asked what happened.
“I jumped and landed funny.”  I responded with still no thought of what I was saying.  I sat on the leather couch and Kirk brought me a blue ice pack.  The coldness of the ice pack hurt more than the pain of my foot.  My mom was then called over.  Will I need to get surgery?  What if I have to get my foot amputated? These were some of the few thoughts that went through my head.  This was my first injury like this, so even though my worries were probably crazy; I didn’t know what was happening.  After 10 minutes of lying down on their brown leather couch my mom showed up.  It was obvious that going to the emergency room was better than the movie.  Ilza had a previous knee injury, so she had her old white aluminum crutches laying around that she gave to me.  I got in my mom’s small off-white mini cooper and said goodbye to Kirk, her mom, and Finn and thanked them for the few hours of hospitality.  

The drive from Westhaven to Mad River Hospital near Arcata was about a ten minute drive.  My mom dropped me off at the main entrance and drove off to find a parking spot in the small lot.  My mom walked and I crutched my way  through the automatic doors over to the counter where we would begin our process to see what had actually happened.  The wait was about 45 minutes, and all I could think about during those 45 minutes was the same, how much would getting surgery hurt, how long will it take to heal? The basic procedure started with asking me questions like, how did it happen? On a scale of 1-10 how much does it hurt?  I told the nurse in blue scrub that the pain was only at a three because the pain wasn’t that bad, it was just the weariness I was feeling.  By now my stomach was sick, it felt empty and cold.  I was taken out of the the main hallway with all the cold tiling and the empty white walls to a room with a not at all heavy duty bed with a thin mattress and blue sheet.  I sat there for 20 minutes texting my dad and a classmates about what had happened.  I was transferred to a generic black wheelchair and pushed into a dark x-ray room.  I got on a same style bed that was reclined up to a 30 degree angle and lied down.  The nurse put a heaving blue tunic like thing on my chest and walked out of the room with the big camera  attached to the wall over my foot and took a picture.  The next shot I had to change the position of my foot.  This is where the pain got worse because the nurse with red hair had to forcefully move it because I was unable too.  The pain went from a 3 to maybe a 5.5 for a small amount of time.

*Ring ring ring.  My dad was calling.  I turned to one side so I could pull my phone out of my right back pocket and answered the phone. I told him I couldn’t talk right now because I was in the middle of getting my x-rays taken.  I texted him what had happened and he told me to call him later.  When the x-rays were done I got back in the wheelchair and back into the small-light blue room with the thin mattress.  My mom and I waited there for five minutes.  The nurse came back in with the pictures of my foot and told me what happened.  She told us how it was a common break.  I had fractured one of my bones on the top left part of my foot under my pinky toe, and that I would be on crutches for at least three weeks, but at most six.  They wrapped up my foot  with skin colored cotton bandages and gave me a special sandle for my foot and told me I was okay to go.

        After we had left the hospital we went to a nearby pharmacy to go get an ice pack of our own.  We then drove home to our house near Trinidad on the bluff.  My room was up a flight of stairs and up a ladder.  It was obvious that I wouldn’t be sleeping in there for a while.  I lied down on the red velvet couch with my ice pack, while my mom went to my room and got my blue and green striped down comforter.  My couch would be my temporary bed.  I called my dad and told him that I was okay, but that I would be on crutches for the next few weeks, he assured me that it would be okay and heal fast.   I lied on the couch disappointed.  It was an accident that could easily have been avoided, but  I was confident that I could bring the positive out of this situation.
        The next morning I got into our Mini Cooper and we drove off to school. Kirk brought me blueberries and raspberries that I enjoyed greatly. At school I kept being asked, “What happened?”   I probably got asked that question 1000s times! Every “what happened?” my response got a little more unexcited.  Class went as normal though, except for P.E.  At P.E. I would just walk around  the field or basketball court on my crutches as the rest of my classmates would play ultimate frisbee or kickball.  There was a slippery part in the hallway that would lead to the lunch room.  I had to be extra careful to avoid falling, but there were still the times when I did.  The pain of falling was a lot worse than the moments where my foot was breaking.  I would always just get back up and proceed to get my lunch from Randy (our lunch cook) like normal.

The crutches weren't really becoming a disadvantage anymore.  After time and practice on the P.E. field I learned how to do some tricks that made my crippled weeks more enjoyable.  I could then walk with only my crutches and no support off of my right foot or left,  and I could jump with my crutches by holding them tight and pushing my arms up quickly with a lot of thrust.  In our drama class we made the most out of me not being able to walk.  We turned my crutches into a prop that would let me forget that the crutches were something I needed.

Three weeks have gone by and I still wasn’t healed.  Four weeks went by and I still wasn’t able to walk.  The fifth week I could put a little bit of pressure on my left foot while on crutches.  The 6th week I could slowly walk with little support from my crutches.  It wasn't till the 8th week that I could completely walk, run, jump, and dunk like normal.  Now I look at this as a great learning experience and to show that you get to control what your feelings are toward something.  I chose to think of the negatives at first and only negative feeling came in, but then I tried to make the best out of everything and sure enough I'm glad I was on crutches, in fact I actually kind of miss them.