Hand Out

I am not the only one in the house who is having physical problems right now. This past Thursday, the next-to-last day of school, my daughter (who I've referred to as Mabel in the past) broke her hand at the school carnival. She was trying to soak her teacher in the dunking booth and hit the target with the ball, but not hard enough to activate the dunker. The rule was that if this happened, the kids were allowed to go up and hit the target with their hand.

I'm assuming the apparatus was something like this image at right, because from what I've been told, once she hit the target with her hand, it sprang back and smashed the back of her hand. In typical drama queen fashion, I'm told she fell to the ground (which for 24 hours both the school nurse and I thought was the only thing that happened), then leapt up and gave the Ronnie James Dio rock 'n roll hand (with the uninjured hand) and yelled, "I'm alright!"

But she wasn't. She went to the nurse, gave one of her indecipherable explanations that make adults' heads spin, and got an ice pack. She came home, gave me a similarly convoluted tale, so I continued the ice packs and Ibuprofen. She didn't complain of a lot of pain, and the hand wasn't discolored, but I started to worry the next morning when the swelling didn't seem to be going down. It was the last day of school, and they only stayed for two hours, so I sent her with a note for the teacher to send her back to the school nurse for her second opinion. Once my daughter returned to the nurse she finally gave the full story of the killer dunking booth, so she called me and let me know, and it was pretty obvious that I needed to get this looked at.

I called the orthopedic doctor we went to three years ago when, again, on the last day of school, we took our Danger Prone Daphne there to cast a broken leg. Like me, we once again dealt with the medical rural community; no one who could cast her would be in the office until Tuesday. So when Mabel got off the bus we got in the vehicle and went to the ER. The good thing about rural medicine is that our emergency rooms tend to be pretty quiet, especially during the day. So we had a very short wait (probably shorter than most doctors' offices) and got right in to get x-rayed. Sure enough, there's a broken bone in the center of her hand, the bone below the middle finger. They put a splint on her hand and forearm and put it in a sling, and we were out of there in about an hour. Not bad.

Here's the cute 9 year-old part: At first Mabel didn't know what a splint was and was really scared about it. Once it was explained to her, she calmed down, but then asked me if she could get a splinter from a splint. Then, after we got the diagnosis and the nurse went off to get the supplies, Mabel turned to me and said, "I bet I'm gonna' get a slingshot!" At first I didn't know what she meant, but then of course I figured out she meant sling. When her daddy showed up at the end of the procedure she proudly showed him her "splinter in her slingshot."

Of course, we still have to get it casted, and that happens this afternoon. I think my daughter was born shot out of a cannon, and it's been incredibly difficult these past few days to keep her from leaping about, balancing on curbs, crawling into our Suburban through the window. We keep explaining to her that she needs to be careful until we can get her hand in the cast, but she can't seem to control her unending energy. It's also a major bummer because now she can't do her gymnastics, which she is so good at, and now she's going to fall behind, especially with her upper body strength. Besides that, she can't play piano, ride her bike or roller blade. If she's lucky she'll get a waterproof cast, or else she can't go swimming, either. What a way to start summer vacation.

So in a way we're having some mother-daughter bonding with our bum arms. One thing we can do is walk, and since we are both participating in a 5k walk June 14, I've been taking her out to train by walking around town. We're up to 2 miles now, and I have to say I'm a little surprised that her stamina isn't better. This child works out hard at gymnastics 4 to 6 hours a week -- the child has fantastic muscle tone -- but I realize now that the majority of that work is in short, fast bursts. They run laps, but only for a few minutes. She's not used to walking non-stop for 45-50 minutes straight. So it's definitely a conditioning experience for her, and we also get to talk and experience things together without a television or computer screen in front of us.