It was a beautiful sunny morning. I woke up happy and excited. The girl with the long brown hair was having her birthday party at her house and it was a swimming party. I recall the air outside that morning was warming up quickly. It was a mid-summer day in the desert.
She wanted me to come over early so she could spend some special time with me before the party started and I agreed. I was excited to see her because over the last week she said that she wanted to be my girlfriend. She liked me and I liked her. You could say it was puppy love. I was nine years old, and she was now going to be eleven years old. I would be ten later in the summer.
She lived in a house with her parents and her siblings that was set well off the main road and surrounded by tall trees and bushes. It was well hidden from the public road. And it was a big house; bigger than most houses I had ever seen. Inside the house, the rooms were big and spacious. The kitchen was as big as our small apartment.
Her room was on the upper floor and occupied a small corner of the house tucked away from the other rooms. Her room was the smallest. Her bed was placed up against a group of windows that she told me she would keep open at night so she could hear the gentle winds blowing through the trees. In the mornings the sun would rise and peak into her room washing the walls with that sunrise glow of color. I still remember the fluffy white bedding and how she looked laying in them. I wished I had a room like hers.
The house was set up to be private, very private. She told me her dad was a nudist. I didn’t know what that was until she explained it to me. I remember being very surprised. On the day of her birthday party, he was fully dressed and presentable. But I do remember the other times when I was there in the house, he only wore a towel.
Before we could go swimming in the pool, we had to change into our bathing suits. The girls were directed to change into their bathing suits in my girlfriend’s bedroom on the upper floor and the boys were directed to change into our bathing suits in the master bathroom which was on the main floor.
The master bathroom floor was lower than the master bedroom floor level, so we had to go down several steps to get to the bathroom level. And the steps were a dark stone. There was a bathtub that was also made from the same dark stone, and it was set below a very tall glass window. We were all excited to go swimming, and we rushed down the steps so we could change, boys being boys of course. And then something happened.
As I was going down the steps with the other boys I slipped and went forward towards the bathtub with my left arm fully stretched out in front of me. I remember my chest hitting the front edge of the bathtub. The bathtub front stopped most of my forward motion, but it lifted me into a horizontal position and my left arm which was already stretched out proceeded to punch through the glass. The glass made that shattering sound and began to fall towards the bathtub.
The boys who were with me started to scream. This scared them into a form of shock I believe. To hear the glass breaking and then watching if fall onto my arm was probably worse than any scary movie they may have seen. And this was real.
And then a large piece of glass slid straight down towards my left arm and sliced it like a sharp knife. I didn’t feel anything even though I watched the glass piece go into my arm. I didn’t scream or cry. I didn’t realize what had just happened. I do remember taking my right arm and lifting my left arm away from the window after all of the broken glass pieces had finished falling. I could not move my left arm, so I had to help it with my right arm.
What I remember next was my girlfriend’s mom ran into the master bathroom and rushed down the steps to me. I could see that she was frightened to look at me and my arm. She quickly pulled me out of the bathtub that I was now bent over and still not crying. The bathtub was covered with glass pieces, my blood, and a small piece of me. She screamed for her husband, and he quickly came in to see what the commotion was. I remember him seeing his wife holding me and she was crying and in what I believe to be her own personal shock. He handed her a towel, and she quickly wrapped it around my arm.
There were no paramedics back then. They called the hospital and explained the situation. And they called my mom. I saw my new girlfriend standing in the kitchen scared and crying as they walked me through the house to the door to go out to where the car was parked.
They quickly put me into the car and drove me to the hospital as fast as they could. My girlfriend’s mom was sitting next to me, holding me and the towel wrapped around my arm. I felt that she was doing her best to be calm and not cry. And I was still not crying, and I don’t know why. And there was no pain in my arm either.
When we arrived at the hospital, I was quickly taken to a room with lots of lights. I recall many nurses and doctors all looking at my arm now wrapped in a white foldable bandage, expressionless. I still felt nothing, and I was scared, really scared. I began to shake, and they covered me in blankets and held onto me. Comforting me. I am only nine years old and in a very strange place.
I remember my mom coming into the room after being there for some time and the doctors talking to her. She was now crying. I heard her ask the doctors if she could make a call, a long-distance call. They took her out of the room, and she was gone for a while.
When my mom came back into the room, she told me she had called grandma to ask her what to do. She told me that grandma told her to tell the doctors to save the arm. I didn’t know what that meant at the time. She then told me that I was going to have to go to sleep for a while and the doctors would be fixing my arm. Then she started to cry again.
I was taken from the room I was in. The bed was on wheels, so it was easy to move. We went down a big hallway and into another room with lots of lights and this special bed in the middle of the room. The nurses carefully moved me onto this special bed. Shortly after I was put on this special bed I went to sleep.
When I woke up, I was in a room with a window, and my arm was sticking straight up in the air away from my chest. My mom was in the room, and her boyfriend was there too. I was hungry and it felt like I hadn’t eaten in days. This feeling would prove to be true.
My mom told me that the doctors were able to fix my arm. She also told me it was going to take some time before I would be able to use my arm and my fingers. She told me that some of my arm muscles were gone. I really didn’t understand. Then a doctor and my mom began to talk to me about what had happened and that I would need to work really hard to learn how to use my arm and fingers again. I still didn’t understand.
Then the doctor explained what the biggest damage to my arm was. I was told that the nerve in my arm had been severed, oops, cut in half and that the doctors stitched it back together, but it would be a wait and see if the nerve would reconnect. Even though the nerve was cut cleanly, there was a lot of damage done to the muscles, tendons and tissues. There was a lot of explanation going on, but remember, I am only nine years old. And I am still scared. And I don’t really understand everything being said.
I remember being in the hospital for many days because they wanted to watch how my arm was doing and was the nerve staying together.
I was told later by my mom, I think when I was around 12, that the injury I experienced was very severe. And the first consideration by the doctors when I arrived at the hospital was that my arm would need to be amputated near the elbow joint. The Doctors thought that the damage done to my arm was too bad to mend. If they had amputated my arm at the elbow, which is what they were considering, I know that my life would have been very different, especially as a young boy.
My mom told me that grandma intervened with her thoughts to the doctors before the surgery to fix my arm, and to know that she can be very persuasive in her growling southern voice would be very important in her conversations with them. She is a Western North Carolina grandmother with very strong beliefs. So, I learned from my mom that my grandma spoke directly with the doctors before my surgery and told them in her southern drawl, and in no other terms, to save the arm.
And they did…
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