Daily writing prompt
Have you ever broken a bone?
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Daily Writing Prompt-Have you ever broken a bone?

Yup! I was not the most coordinated child or teenager, though I wasn’t very adventurous either. I guess you could say I was just plain clumsy. The first major injury I had was a torn ligament in my leg from the most adventurous thing I probably ever tried to do-jump a curb on my bike(bike-1, me-0). My memory has faded with age, but this one has stuck with me, perhaps because of the chronic retelling and the awful pain that came with it. The story goes like this…

I had just recovered from a sprained ankle (clumsy injury) and I was out for a bike ride, which was probably my favorite outdoor activity as a child. I looked at that curb and thought, I can do this, today is the day (I’m sure that’s what I thought). When my tire met the curb, unfortunately, my Schwinn did not do what I had imagined it would do and my bike when to the left while my body went to the right with my ankle stuck in the cross bar and twisted. I tried to get up, but to no avail whatsoever. Thankfully I was wearing my helmet and when someone I didn’t know found me on the ground and asked if I needed help, I was able to point out my apartment and they went and fetched my mom. Sleep escaped me that whole night as I kept my leg elevated, the pain was so intense. The emergency room doctor told us it was just a sprain, but my dad thankfully took me for a second opinion as I had just recovered from a sprain on the other ankle and it did not look or feel like that. The next doctor determined that I had torn my ligaments and into a cast I went for an entire summer. I wasn’t so graceful on crutches either nor could I swallow my pain meds in the form of a gel capsule. Those will explode in your mouth if left in there too long and they do taste terrible in case you didn’t know.

Another clumsy injury I endured was in high school, my senior year I believe. I was running up the stairs to the art wing when I tripped on a step. I landed so hard on my arm that I fell down the rest of the flight. God is so good and so gracious. In a building with upwards of 1600 students, not a single person witnessed this very embarrassing and clumsy fall, but my friends all observed daily the changing shape and colors of the giant bruise that the edge of that step left on my arm.

As for breaks, I have broken baby toes a handful of times by catching them on a corner of a wall(clumsy) and have most recently broken a finger(careless and clumsy) as my dog got the zoomies when I didn’t have a proper grip on the leash(I knew as soon as I heard it crack that it was broken), and I’m sure if I went to the doctor when it happened, they would have confirmed that I did at one point break my tailbone when I fell on ice several years ago(which explain my recent fear of ice).

All in all, none of these injuries were too major and I’m thankful that looking back I can laugh at myself and the situations I got myself into with my clumsiness. I think my boys all got my clumsiness and affinity for injuries but those are stories for another time!