Them’s the breaks
It hurts you almost as much as it hurts them when your child gets injured.
As she came up the path beside my little home office, a sound came out of her I’d never heard before – a wild, animal howling that sounded barely human. I saw her run past my window, her school uniform a bobbing blue streak.
It was my daughter Rosa, and it was clear something very bad had happened. She burst though the kitchen door, her little face a mess of tears and snot, a bloody graze reddening her elbow.
She held her left forearm aloft with her right hand, as if it was a disconnected foreign thing that belonged to somebody else, and pushed it towards me so I could see the cause of her distress.
There, I witnessed some very bad geometry at work. At the end of her tender little 12-year-old arm, her hand was bent sideways at a radical angle, the wrist severely swollen, a dark purple bruise spreading like a stormcloud under the skin.
She’d fallen off her bike just up the road, and landed on concrete with all her weight on her left hand. A stranger found her wailing in the park and walked her home, trying to help her stay calm.
But calm was not an option. As we drove towards the hospital, I felt the beginning of shock coming on, but in me, rather than her.
My daughter was starting to relax a little, safe in the knowledge that her mum and dad would sort this out, but I was a mess.
I felt raw, shaky, and strangely negligent, as if I’d failed in my parental duty of protection. It’s a tough thing, to watch your child enduring serious and sustained pain while you’re powerless to take that pain away.
This was only the second time Rosa had seriously hurt herself. When she was 4, she was clambering over a boat on a friend’s farm and fell inside, and a sharp point of the anchor had gone deep into her leg.
She walked up the long driveway to the house, shaking with shock, and wept bitterly during the long drive back in from the countryside to get it stitched.
And now here we were, eight years on, back in the same A&E department, and this time she was brave, and I was the one who felt like weeping. I sat beside her, a ball of nerves, while Rosa waited patiently for painkillers, X-rays, the attention of medical staff, with an icepack on her wrist.
In due course, a house surgeon showed us her X-ray, and it was a grim sight, with both lower forearm bones snapped at the wrist. They’d have to give her some grunty painkillers, he said, and gas as well, then straighten it when they put on the cast.
My heart sank. I imagined a jolt of agony as they twisted her broken bones back into place. I could see Rosa tensing up, too, the anxiety starting to escalate as they wheeled equipment into her cubicle.
But the nurse got things rolling before she had time to freak out. A syringe of Fentanyl was shot up her nose. She was handed a rubber mouthpiece attached to a Nitrous Oxide canister and told to huff away vigorously until she felt light-headed.
Her eyes glazed, and she let loose giggles instead of screams as the surgeon clamped down hard on the wet plaster, pushing the bones into line and holding them in place until the cast set solid.
‘‘It sounds like you were all very far away, and I was dreaming,’’ she said afterwards, and I knew this to be true. In my misspent youth, I was once at a party where someone handed a canister of this stuff around.
On the drive home, I felt deeply relieved, and grateful that we lived in an enlightened nation where emergency medical treatment was still seen as a basic human right, rather than just another profiteering opportunity for private enterprise.
The accident happened a few days before the school holidays, and I thought she’d be delighted to have an extra couple of days off. But the following day, Rosa was desperate to go to school.
She had a war story to tell, and there are worse ways to spend the day than basking in the warm glow of sympathy from friends and teachers. And, of course, she wanted people to draw on her cast.
She came home the following day with her injury a blaze of colour and foolishness.
Alongside comments both expected (‘‘Get well soon’’) and unlikely (‘‘Shake your tail feather’’), someone had drawn a dark blue semicircle surrounding a distant yellow dot and written LATEOTT above it. Light At The End Of The Tunnel, apparently.
My daughter and her mates call each other ‘‘egg’’, and so the cast featured beaucoup d’oeufs. And in the same way that kids used to scrawl AC/DC on their pencil cases when I was a kid, there were a few band names, too, including an unexpectedly patriotic ‘‘Flight Of The Conchords’’.
It seemed important to add a few scribbles of my own. When she was younger, Rosa would jokingly call me ‘‘King of the Universe and World’’, so I drew a regal crown with the word ‘‘Dad’’ underneath in gold pen.
And on the underside of the cast, where my daughter had no chance of seeing it but all her friends could, in spindly adolescent writing people might think was hers, I wrote ‘‘Justin Bieber 4 Eva!’’.