The Left Arm

Those who know me know my story about my arm.   My left arm.  Now that it's summer and I wear shorter sleeve shirts - maybe a tank top or two- I see the left arm. The left arm reminds me of one day when I was five years old. I'm sure many of my friends and relatives have stories about a traumatic injury in their life.  When their bike ran into a car, when they fell off the bunk bed and broke their arm, some kind of accident.  Well I had one. I've only had one that was this injurious, and well, it left its mark.

I was five, and like all five year olds, I was trying to be all big in my world, and I was surrounded by older kids.  I wanted to be big like them.  Do things like them, be with them, be one of them.  One day in the summer, my mom got a babysitter for us. It must have been a regular week day, because she had a dentist appointment. I don't know where dad was, probably at work or maybe he was at the dentist too--I don't know, and all I know is we had the teenage girl from next door as our babysitter.  She was taking care of us like teenage girls do by telling us to go outside while she watched a soap opera; problem was is her kid sister, who I desperately wanted to be with and do things with, wanted the older teenage sister to drive her somewhere.  Somewhere other than here hanging out with babies like me and my sister.  The teenage babysitter argued with her and basically said, "Are you kidding.. I'm babysitting and no, I'm not driving you somewhere."   Well I heard this conversation and being the little smartie pants I was, I had a great idea. I thought, "The kid sister should ride the tandem bike they had in the garage. That way she could go to the friends house, pick her up and they would ride back together on the tandem bike".  

Problem solved! I'm so smart!  I heard the kid sister storm out of my house in a huff... and I ran out of the kitchen down our hall way to tell her about my great five year old  idea.   Our house was a strange house.  It was a government house, rented by my parents who worked at the state deaf school.  It was a long-almost trailer house size- house, kind of modeled on a military barrack. The rooms were just organized in a long sequence so the living room was in front of the dining room, the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom and bedroom.  A long row of rooms.  Well I had a ways to run to the front of the house mid-way from the kitchen so I was running... running fast down that hallway to the front door.  

I was at full peal speed when I flung my arm out to the front door - with a glass single pane window where a screen should have been- but wasn't and and my little hand hit the glass - full bore. The glass didn't go with my force to open the door, the glass  broke. All over my arm.  My tender five year old chubby little arm.The sharp single pane glass sliced it, shards of glass falling into open gaping L shaped skin flap and other gaping skin flaps that were immediately gushing bright red blood.  All over the front porch.  I vividly remember this. I looked down, whimpered a bit, and then SCREAAAAAAAMMEED.  The babysitter came running. She screamed, my baby sister screamed.  The babysitter ran away and must have ran next door to get someone - her mom- her dad- I don't know.  Someone came running, and next thing I knew, I was in the bathroom with the babysitter and she was trying to get some control of the situation.  She grabbed the purple towel that hung on the towel bar. The pretty towel  - that was  "for pretty" " not for bath" my mom would sign.  I groaned, she wrapped my little arm, glass shards and all in the towel, and somehow her dad was there then, and drove us all to the hospital emergency room about  25 blocks away.   I'm sure we were going pretty damn fast.

Next thing..maybe I passed out..(my adult mom instinct tells me I probably did), I am laying there in a ER room with a nurse, and a doctor. I'm crying like a baby, but there's a nurse and she's holding my other hand and she is nice.  The doctor is picking out glass. I can see it and hear it tinging in a little silver bowl.  Uh.   Then my mom and dad come in.  I don't know how they got in there... but they let them in, and I started crying again.  My mom was a wreck, she was crying, my dad was upset. I don't know what they saw but after while everybody calmed down and I came out with my left arm all wrapped from wrist to armpit in a huge gauzy wrap. It looked  like a mummy arm.   I remember my Dad  rushed to a drug store to buy me something to cheer me up, because on the drive home with  there was a HUGE bag of candy and a bag of new coloring books and crayons.  I bet they knew I would be spending a lot of time inside and maybe coloring would cheer me up.  

I colored for days.  I couldn't go outside. My mom kept a serious eye on me and didn't let me do ANYTHING except rest and color. I colored houses, people, animals. I gave everyone on my block a coloring page because it was my thank you for the booty of stuff  I received to "get well". I was sick of the candy that I ate too much of, and I wanted to go outside and play.  Everyone else was outside.  I wanted to be outside too and it was HOT. My neighborhood friends were out in the sprinkler and those blue plastic pools.

So my mom and aunt invented this way for me to go outside and cool off.  A bread bag.   An Eddy's Bread bag. All the moms kept them around for some reason, to stuff  laundered and still damp cotton shirts into to iron in the morning, as a sandwich bag, what have you... there were plastic bread loaf bags around. So she put my injured five year old arm in the bag, tied it at the top with some yarn, smiled at me and signed " it's good now, you can go outside with cousins, no swimming, but you can play in water sprayer- go play."

Really Guys?   Me and my bread bag arm.  I spent the next couple of  weeks over the  hot summer with a plastic bread bag on my arm anytime I needed a bath or wanted to play outside.  You remember old fools-- the stitches from long ago could NOT get wet. They would get infected and gross so, you had to keep an injury like my gashed up arm with 500 stitches impeccably clean and dry.  On a five year old!?  Really?

I'm lucky I have my arm. I've been told it was a pretty serious injury  being very close to damaging major nerves and leaving me with a useless arm.  I have 5 gashes that over the past mmm -40 some years have faded and are just a reminder of that summer.  People sometimes notice them when I have totally forgotten about them and point out the sign of a catastrophic injury.  Those scars sort of left a mark physically and emotionally. I don't really care for sleeveless tops and tanks. Maybe it's the scars and the flabby arms I recently found to be even more unattractive.  Yeah, that too.   I never really consciously knew that I liked to be covered,  but when summer is over, I find comfort in covering up the arms.  And those battle scars with the old glass door is forgotten.