Good breaks run in the family

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
August 25, 2013

When my husband and I first started dating, he liked to tell his friends that I broke his arm.

Technically, that’s not true. He did that all by himself. But, it is true that  I was the one who suggested we go ice skating.

Denton is good at most sports. He grew up skiing and won dozens of trophies racing BMX bikes. I skied once my entire life and don’t feel the need to do it again. As for cycling, remind me to tell you about the time I fell off my bike and onto my terrified 3-year-old child.

Anyhow, the point is: I wanted to pick an activity in which I was proficient. I’m actually not a good skater. But, I was mistaken for Kristi Yamaguchi once, so I think that has to count for something, right?

Denton, who grew up on the West Coast, had gone ice skating maybe twice during his childhood. He certainly had never played hockey.

Fast forward to the end of our skating date. I ended up falling flat on my face, but he did great…until he attempted a hockey stop.

Boom! All 6-foot-3-inches of him landed hard on his wrist and he ended up with a broken radius. I felt horrible about it, but he took it all in stride. He had a scuba diving trip already booked and paid for and had no intention of canceling. His orthopedic surgeon told him there was no way he would be able to dive wearing a cast.

Denton is not one to take no for an answer. He found a source that made waterproof casts, ordered it and brought it to his doctor and asked her if this would do. It did. He went and had a great time.

The next time he would scuba dive was on our honeymoon. 🙂

Coincidentally, the radius is the same bone I had broken decades before when I was a gymnast. This was the tail end of my (non eventful) gymnastics career. My break was so severe that I was in that cast for a good half year. Linda, my childhood friend who recently found me on Facebook, said that she recalled me using a knitting needle to relieve some of the itches I had on my arm during that summer. I remember that! It was incredibly uncomfortable. I remember standing by the air conditioner unit to try to cool off my arm. But sometimes, that just wasn’t enough.

Let’s not even talk about how emaciated and smelly my arm was when the cast finally did come off.

Anyhow, my precocious son has joined our little family’s unfortunate cast club. There was a giant water slide. He wanted to conquer it. And he did. Until the second or third time when his tiny wrist got stuck on the slides’s side and snapped back. He has a buckle fracture. Unlike me, who cried like a baby when I broke my arm, Kyle was very stoic. A little too stoic. It was only when I carried him to the car that he began to sob.

I remember I broke my arm during spring vacation and, upon my return to school, was asked by dozens of people what had happened. Of course, none of them were together when I explained so I had to repeat the story over and over and over. The novelty of being the kid with the broken arm grew old fast.

Tomorrow, Kyle returns to kindergarten. I’m sure his classmates will be curious about what happened.

I wonder if he’ll tell them the truth. Or, maybe, he’ll just say that good breaks run in the family.

Here’s hoping for a safer 2014.

© 2013 JAE-HA KIM | All Rights Reserved