When They Can’t Bend, They Break

Our spirits were high and our guards were low, a perfect situation for disaster to strike. It was approximately five p.m. on Monday, December 19, 2005. It had snowed that day, but the flurries were fading fast as evening approached. My friend Conor, his brother Tavish, and I were relaxing in Conor’s room before going to the gym. We were watching some particularly funny skits of Chapelle’s Show, and listening toG-Unit. When Conor’s mom was finally ready to drive us, we clambered into the dark green Subaru station wagon and enjoyed an uneventful drive to the Kilpatrick Athletic Center.

Strength training was one of my passions, and I always put everything I had into my workouts. I watched Tavish do some calf raises and decided to try that out myself. The motions seemed easy, so I got under the weight and lifted it up on my shoulders. There was way too much weight on the bar for a scrawny high school freshman. But my own inexperience with weightlifting, and an embarrassing urge to impress my friends, gave me motivation. I pushed up the weight with my legs and stood straight upright, with the weight resting behind my head. Then I tried to step up on the wood riser so my heels would hang suspended off the edge. The weight pulled me backward and I lost my balance. The weight twisted my forearms back, and crushed the bones in both my wrists.

I screamed, mostly because of the pain, but then I screamed again in frustration at the fat, wrinkly women on the ellipticals, and the scrawny teenagers doing free-weight exercises, oblivious. Or trying to be. I was frustrated at myself for being an idiot, and jealous of everyone who wasn’t in as much pain as me. I was also terrified about my wrists and hands. What if they had to be amputated? What if I now would be a cripple with two useless and shriveled hands for the rest of my life?

I looked down at my wrists. Both were at a disgustingly unnatural angle, bent back over each forearm. It was one of the most frightening moments of my life.

Tavish was trying to convince me they weren’t broken.

“Here, let me see,” he said.

I could hardly focus enough to argue with him.

“I know when my own body is broken,” I think I said.

He walked me out of the weight room and brought me to the line of hard seats at the top of the first staircase, overlooking the busy lobby. At that moment I hated everyone gathering around with their mouths open. I had never felt such a strong need for help, and all they could do was stand still and watch me. I saw a great number of faces, some I knew and some I didn’t, all staring. Confused people, who wanted to tell this bizarre story over dinner to their families. I wanted them to help me, I didn’t want them to just look at me. How useless these people are, I remember thinking.

I was shivering badly when the paramedics strapped me to a stretcher and rolled me through the lobby and into the snowy night. One of them threw a blanket over me and gently said: “It’s warm, isn’t it? We heated these up in the ambulance.”

Going over the speed bumps on the drive out was excruciating and I wondered if the driver was a professional or a volunteer. In the x-ray room the nurse told me to put my hand on the flat surface.

“Turn your arm one quarter of a turn.”

I did, but my hand stayed in the same spot. Even without painkillers, at this point I found myself distanced from the experience. Enough so that I was able to laugh at the position of my hand, as one might laugh at a low-budget horror movie.

I had two broken wrists and a fractured elbow. They put me in splints, and, when the swelling subsided a bit, put both my arms in full casts. A few weeks later I went back to Hawai’i,where I was living with my family for a year, and was told by a doctor there that if I let my bones heal the way the doctor had cast them, I would never be able to move my left hand or wrist ever again. The Hawaiian doctor broke my left arm again, set it properly, and fixed it with four pins and ten staples to keep the incision closed. The operation took over three hours.

I spent the next two months with both my arms in casts. Everything my new friends were doing I couldn’t do: no sunny beaches for me. No surfing, snorkeling, scuba diving … all the outdoor sports I had intended to enjoy to their fullest while I was there were off-limits. I was far away from the friends I grew up with in Massachusetts and the homesickness was intense. I read every book Robert Parker had ever written in those two months. I spent hours lying on my bed, listening to music, letting my mind wander, and thinking. Thinking maybe more than I had ever thought before.

From this experience I lost a certain quality that defined me as a child: a reassurance that things would always work out the way I wanted them to. A feeling of invincibility.

But I gained something more important. I learned that when things don’t turn out the way you expect, other things surface. I learned, for example, how much I like to think. How much I like to read and listen to music. I learned how to have real conversations with people, not just be active on the basketball court or on the beach. I learned patience. And tolerance for people who couldn’t do things as well as I thought they should be able to.

Most of all, I learned to be flexible. I think now flexibility is my greatest strength. When we aren’t flexible, we break. But when we’re flexible we’re interested in a whole world of people who otherwise might remain strangers. We trust something inside us that’s deeper than physical strength. We’re no longer afraid of change, or shock, or the unexpected, because we know we can deal with it.