Back to childhood and memories, I don’t Want

I fell down two basement steps this afternoon. My foot was too far on the edge of the step and I lost my balance (something I don’t have much of to begin with from a fall four years ago). I put my right “foot” down on the basement floor on the outside of my ankle first with emphasis on the outside of the side of my foot. My first instinct was to cry out in pain. The ex (landlord) was home for lunch (who doesn’t come home for lunch) and wanted to know what I had done now.

I got him to help me up, saying that if I could pull myself up on to it and then put weight on it walking then it was OK, right. Right? He said who knows. He pointed to my basement shoes as the cause of the fall, but I have been wearing them that way for eight years and never had a slip on the basement stairs before. He doesn’t say it in the same words, but it is obvious he thinks I do these things, still, to get attention, just like my mother said. It is then I remember why I got the divorce and curse my income situation and inability to move.

I may live here, but I am on my own. Unlike when I was a child, why would I keep getting hurt when I have no one to care for me. When I broke my leg four years ago, I had to sign up for Meals on Wheels in order to have at least one balanced meal a day.  Even when we were married, when I got hurt or had surgery, there was no “attention”. Why would I want all this pain with absolutely no “reward”!

I have been suffering with pneumonia for 11 days. Had it not been for my childhood friend Carol, I am not sure what I would have done. I couldn’t go to the store (luckily, my pharmacy delivers). Carol brought me broth, egg salad, pears, bananas, strawberries, kiwi, and cantaloupe (not to mention Boost); most of the fruit was already sliced so all I had to do was fix the meals. Being a Type II Diabetic, eating protein and fruit on a set schedule is key to the controlled state of my numbers. Beside the right foot, that now (almost 2000., fell around 1330, yeah, I like military time), there is a pain in my left leg about the place I broke the other leg four years ago.

There is a back-story to my spiral…

For my 12^th birthday, 1967, I got a bicycle (grown up without the fifties fat tires of my older sister’s that I had been riding). Western Auto had a $10 fee for assembly, but dad fancied himself a handyman (whole other essay), and put it together himself. Sometimes, after a four-to-twelve shift, when he got home, he would fix steaks (not normal fare) in foil packets in the oven with chopped onions – I never have been able to replicate them – he had brought the bike in  from its hiding place in the garage, set it in the living room, and he was fixing some of those steaks.

Someone at work had brought him some beautiful beefsteak tomatoes. I snuck downstairs as he was slicing a couple. I was caught by mom seated on the end of the couch that was blocked from the upper landing of the staircase. It could have been the suppressed inhaled shriek at the bike with the bow and the card on it. She started yelling at me while dad came from the kitchen. He appealed to the premise that it was, in fact, already my birthday and he had an extra steak. I had to wait until morning on the card, but I loved the late night attention, steak, and the view of my shiny new blue bike (still my favorite color).

Almost two months later was the first day of seventh grade. I loved all my teachers and classes (except PE). I came home, changed clothes, and headed out on my bike. I rode every day unless it was raining. I was about a block from the house when I saw this tire going down the hill on Scott Street and wondered where it came from; as I looked behind me, I realized it was my front tire.  I hit the nut on the middle of the handlebars with my chin and then landed chin first on the asphalt with the rest of my body coming over my head the wrong way and thudding on the pavement.

I lay there stunned for a moment and got up running to the back porch of the house I had landed. It had been my best friend’s house until her family moved to Arizona that summer. I didn’t know the new people and though I explained, they would not let me use their phone. I remember sitting on their steps and sobbing when I noticed drops of blood falling on the step below me. I put my hand up and felt my chin bleeding and ran the half a block home and asked/begged mom to put a Band-Aid® on it.

She sat me at the hallway desk and had Steve fetch the hydrogen peroxide, Mercurochrome, and Band-Aids®, asking/ordering him to walk my bike and tire home from Scott Street. I continued my pleas for a simple cover on the wound (in my heart of hearts I knew it was worse than that, but wouldn’t consider such). As mom cleaned it, she kept clicking her tongue and telling me that it looked like it needed to be seen by the doctor.

The two to three weeks from stitches to removal and an actual Band-Aid®, were the longest weeks of my pre-teen life. Since the bike fell apart that one wasn’t my fault. At the last dress-out PE class of the school year, we were playing kickball in the gym. You kicked the ball from home, and tried to make it around the bases before the ball did. At first base, I was tripped (no one really believed me, but she admitted it to me at our 10-year high school reunion).

All I could see on the way down was the gym floor coming for my chin and I stuck out my arms. My right hand/wrist made contact with the floor first, bouncing across the floor in front of me as I fell the rest of the way down. The fall felt as though it was in slow motion and even the memory is the same. The nurse’s secretary was the only one there as the nurse was handling something in another part of the junior high. The secretary let me sit with an ice pack for a few minutes, then said, I was being dramatic, and sent me back to class with the ice pack. She said she would tell the nurse, but the nurse never did come to check on me. I was in pain and had never been in that kind of pain before. The teacher (last class of the day, the day before Memorial Day) checked it a couple of times. I had to take the ice pack back but just left it, as there was no one in the nurse’s office and I went home.

At home, mom agreed there was nothing wrong with it, I was being melodramatic, and told me to go out and play. I went outside, however, anything I tried to do (especially the trapeze) hurt like the dickens! Dad got home a couple of hours later and it had become swollen. He believed me and put ice on it. Back then, Memorial Day was still the 30^th of May and was celebrated on that day no matter what day it fell on. The next day was Wednesday and since the doctor’s office was closed by the time dad got home, I would need to hold in there until Thursday.

The pain just kept building and it was the first time I had felt such pain; not even tonsillitis ever hurt that bad or the aftermath of the tonsillectomy. Ice cream couldn’t even help my wrist and dad was walking the floor with me all night, changing ice packs and keeping track of the next dose of baby aspirin I could take. I was wide-awake and crying, our doctor was on vacation, but I heard dad call the emergency room at the hospital (St. Joseph’s in Alton) in the middle of the night. There were no x-ray, or any other kind, technicians on at night and doctors were only called in for dire emergencies, which my wrist was not. They told him the orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Mira, held a cast clinic every weekday. Though it was a holiday he would have one that morning until noon. Dad told mother to take me the next morning.

We stopped off in Wood River for her to pick up her mother. I was scared, but since I was “being a baby and milking it for all it was worth” (didn’t know what that meant), I didn’t dare mention the scared part. A technician took me for an x-ray and returned me to the clinic waiting room. The wrist was not broken, but he explained to my mother the way I had landed on it, I had “studded it”, shoving the palm of my hand into the wrist each time, it hit. His remedy was to “half cast” it. He molded the bottom of a cast from the inside of my palm knuckles to just below my wrist. The cast (half) was only on the bottom of my arm forming a hard splint. He then wrapped it in an Ace® bandage holding the cast to the arm.

The trick, he told mother, was that he had braced the hand up slightly at the wrist. When he had turned my wrist up, it was almost instant relief. It still hurt, but not nearly like it had all night. I would spend the first six weeks of my summer in a “cast” and a sling (it would be off by vacation in August).

The next day was the last day of school and I had my first taste of operating with one arm – definitely no fun – even if I was still being told I was making it up (at home by one parent). Dad was off that next day also and he took me to school and went straight to the nurse’s office to give the secretary “a piece of my (his) mind”. I understand he was heard all the way to the office and got the attention of the principal as well. I overheard him tell my mother that the secretary was in a world of trouble.

In high school, I had quite a few knee mishaps (it was bone-on-bone and had to be replaced when I was 45). Each one was taken seriously by dad and my brothers but mom would tell me every chance she had me alone that I was melodramatic and making up the accidents to get attention. To this day, I am still not fond of pain. I have endured the same accusations with every accident or illness since childhood as well.

Today, when I fell down the basement steps, after he helped me up, the vibe I was getting that I had done it on purpose made me feel as though I am about three-inches tall and as unlovable as my mother always told me I was. Déjà´ vu!