Radial Buckle Fracture

It never fails. Whenever tragedy strikes, I won’t have my cell phone on me. Admittedly, I only forget the phone somewhere (home, work) maybe once or twice a year. But, yeah, it never fails: when something bad happens, my cell phone will be M.I.A.

Wednesday, in a rush to get out of work with a clean desk and as many lose ends tied as possible since I was taking the next day off to watch the girls during a school closing, I left the phone on my desk. I moseyed on home via the scenic route, and, two minutes away from the town library where I habitually pick up Little One, I reached over to send her a text.

Phone wasn’t there. Dammit! I contemplated turning back, but figured a day with the cell phone (or electronic Honey Do leash, as I like to think of it) would be manageable.

I turned down the street where the library was and spotted my daughter red and sobby, surrounded by four of her friends.

I immediately pulled into the next parking lot and they brought her over. “What happened?” I asked from the window, assessing my soon-to-be teen.

Her face was the pink and splotchy mess that told me she’d just had a terrible cry. Then my eyes saw her arm – bandaged and bulging. “What happened?” I repeated, more urgently.

Turns out she and one of her friends were horsing around on a footbridge that spans the railroad tracks a quarter mile away. Little One lost her balance and tumbled down five stairs, depositing her full weight on the outside of her right wrist. She was instantly overwhelmed with pain, and her resourceful friends walked her to a nearby pharmacy, pooled their money together to buy some gauze, and one who just took a babysitting “Safe Sitter” class bandaged her up. Then they waited for me.

I thanked them, put Little One in the passenger seat, got Patch from Aftercare down the road. Then we raced straight to the emergency room of the local hospital a few miles away, the hospital where both my children were born. She was immediately seen, X-rayed, and given some Motrin. The X-rays revealed a buckle fracture and she was put in a soft cast.

(Right after leaving the hospital, we drove to my work so I could retrieve the cell phone, possible to avoid further tragedy down the road ...)

If I had been the one who fell, my bone would break. My bones, at the half-century mark, are like hollowed out old sticks. Really. So are, most likely, yours. Hers, being still twelve years old, are more like rubber bands. Mushy wet rubber bands, especially on the inside. Instead of breaking, the outside of the bone fractured where the radius connects with the wrist bones. There’s an outward bulge you can see on the X-ray, and that’s an effect of the buckling.

Well, the next day we had to visit our orthopedic pediatrician. Yes, we have one, with Patch’s ankle injury over the Christmas holiday and Little One’s prior wrist sprain the summer before. He’s a great guy, a little eccentric, a dry sense of humor, and we could listen to his monotonous delivery for hours. That cheered up Little One. Once the doctor reviewed the X-ray from the hospital and examined her arm and mobility, he decided to put her in a hard cast for two weeks.

“To make it kind of fun,” he added in a nerdy way that made Little One grin, “you can pick the color of the cast.” Then he began to recite his inventory: “We have red, pink, purple, yellow, blue, lime green, just plain white, …”

“Blue!” my daughter decided. It was her school color.

“Blue,” the doctor sighed to himself. “They always pick the blue …”

So despite the trauma of the past two days, she’s very excited. Her friends stopped by a couple times, once bearing Get Well gifts – an oinking green pig, some M&Ms, flowers. She has a respite from gym class and clarinet practice. And, she said to me, “I always wanted to have a cast!”

Here she is, rocking the blue: