Last August I turned 26, and with a straight face determined that this would truly be the year that I would pack away all the youthful frivolousness and whimsy that I have celebrated in my life since I was way too young, tone it down and take off on a new threshold of maturity. I went out and bought a new suit and high heels to acknowlege how serious I was about growing up, and then proceeded to charge like a hothead through a series of very adult situations.
So its kind of odd that five months later, I find myself adapting to a new routine of drinking milk, napping with my foot propped on a teddy bear, crawling on my knees up the stairs and crushing on a comicbook superhero. I mean, there were times that I thought I was regressing into childishness before, but it now appears that I've devolved all the way back to the crib, living the lifestyle of a little baby.
The bad omens
The day after the New Year, I went out to the skatepark with the grlz to skate off our weekend hangovers and start the year right. We braided our hair and danced in our seats all the way down there. It was a progressively rowdy car ride. At one moment I found myself simmering down and laying back staring up at the sky, watching the rhythm of the passing electrical poles. I noted the assembly of small black sparrows perched on the electric lines, there was like four miles of uninterrupted bird sitting alongside the road perched wing to wing. As we sped further forward, the birds started to flock in bigger groups, clustering in from smaller groups coming from different directions.
We turned the music off and marvelled. After a couple of miles they were flying in massive clouds of black and looked like liquid shapes that shifted directions, funneled twisted and spun. The bird formation was at times hundreds of meters wide, groups would break off and come back, flying faster and faster. They surrounded our car, got close, flew straight to the windshield and spun away, came back and swirled around us. We were getting closer to the skatepark and the black birdcloud was still escorting us.
We were just a few blocks away from the skatepark and I was still staring transfixed out the window. My rapture was broken with a jolt when my eyes landed on the sign for the ambulance company that screamed *emergency!* and was situated unfortunately just a few blocks away from the skatepark. I sat up and shook myself back to reality and hoped I might never have to be in one of those.
We entered the skatepark, our usual spectacle of disorderly femininity and immediately aroused the ire of the girl at the front desk, wearing head to toe skate gear and the mug of a gargoyle. "She must not skate at all," we collectively thought at the same time as she glared at us with beady eyes, and possessively placed her hand on Bob, the guy at the desk. She smooched him, while staring at us with a peripheral sideways glance. We shifted uncomfortably. "Nice shoes!" I said. She ignored me. A girl skater would have been excited to see us, at least as excited as her boyfriend was. My cousin rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue in her cheek lewdly. We signed in and bought our way into the new girls skate free! Tuesday club that Bob agreed to start there on the spot.
Yippeekiyay
We warmed up in the pool and loosened our muscles. It was slippery with waxy masonite and required a lighter gentler touch than concrete. It took a while to grow accustomed to the feeling of the pool, but I was getting stoked out more by the minute. It had been such a long time! I had a few tentative runs and realized that this bowl was small enough for me to get up to the lip consistently and had enough compact curves to speed me around endless lines. I worked my way up from just hitting the back truck for a 5-0 and then I finally found a place where I can stick a long 50-50. I've been wanting to do that. I started experimenting and seeing if I could get my front wheels over the lip and try a feeble grind. Yeehaw! Almost! I took a break and called my boyfriend to brag that I was skating and he wasn't. That bowl was fun.
Hours past and we were skating hard, we moved to the street course and did some wall rides. I made some miserable attempts on the manual pad and got super frustrated with my stabs at landing my flip, which I have sometimes then lose. So I snuck back to the pool and did some runs, my heart was beating hard now and I was having so much fun, I was almost delerious.
Here's when it happened
A girl came up to the platform and started talking to me, Corinne and Cheryl. We high fived her and just started chatting while we took turns skating. She asked me how to drop back into the pool from a 50-50 and I couldn't explain it. "Uh, you just twist and drop? Do you know what I'm talking about? Here, let me show you."
I waited for the last skater to leave the pool and balanced my trucks onto the lip. Something felt wrong from the moment I stepped on the board, but I just did what Mariah does and I shook it off. Something felt wrong as I pivoted on the back truck, but I pushed down with the front anyway because I was explaing something to someone. Something felt wrong as I was sliding down, but I figured it might be salvageable...
As my back wheel hung up on the lip, I dropped forward five feet to the ground, where at some point along the way the edge of my shoe by my pinky toe caught the ground as my leg and my body twisted the exact opposite direction, crushed on top of it. I heard a snap, inhaled, said "FUCK!", and knew that whatever happened it was serious. My foot had bent beckwards, the wrong way. It hurt so bad I couldn't hide it, or get up; the two things I normally do immediately when I fall. My leg spasmed and shook and inwardly I screamed, and as I got onto my elbows to look up, I saw three helmeted rollerbladers and two bikers gaping at me. I thought for a moment they heard my silent scream, before I realized that they were just shocked because they saw it all. I summoned my best glare and shot them with it, then looked for my friends. They mobilized into action, Cheryl took off my shoe as I tried not to cry and I hopped out of the pool with my arms on their shoulders. I realized that for the first time in my life I had to be carried out of the bowl.
I'd never sprained my ankle before or broken any bones. I've donated blood to the concrete, and lost a lot of skin, but my skeletal frame has always been intact. The only other time I had ever been injured somewhat seriously was the time that I got a concussion from skating in the rain like an idiot at Wilson, and me and Whitey crashed into each other head on - our skulls hit the ground and I was seeing stars. That was painful more for how stupid it was than actual nervous system trauma.
"I never thought I get broke off in a pool this small!" I said as they got me onto the bench and ran for ice.
"That's happened to me before. You're talking to a professional ankle roller. We just have to get ice right away," Corinne said.
I'd never sprained my ankle before so I didn't know how that was supposed to feel, and looked dubiously at my foot, which now dangled at freakish angle. "Do you think its sprained?" I asked.
"Yeah. The same thing happened to me before. You should get an aircast. In two weeks you'll be fine."
"Two weeks? I can't waste two weeks of my life hobbling around! I have all kinds of shit to do!"
"Well maybe you could get back on it in a week and a half."
"That sounds better."
Bob the guy at the front desk came over. "Its probably a sprain", he decided and I was relieved that that was what they though it was. A different girl was with him, rubbing his ass.
"You think its a sprain? Does that girl want to kick our asses now too?" I asked my cousin. "I hope its a sprain."
"Hey," she said, "do not ask me. I am not a doctor."
"Yeah. It has to be a sprain."
But there was no way that I was going to take a single step on the foot, and when Cheryl asked if I could walk to the car I refused. I knew I couldn't.
I looked around in a panic as the cold blood from the ice seemed to trickle through my body. Everyone here was like thirteen years old! I needed help! Then I spotted Brian C. walking up the stairs, he just got there and was tying his shoes. He was a family guy and the father of several small children and I trusted him as a responsible adult and recalled the time that he broke his wrist at Wilson. I was so glad to see him.
"Brian Carly! Could you please please please carry me out to the car? I weigh around a hundred pounds! I don't want to try to make it down the stairs!!!"
He saw the ice pack and winced. He picked me up and carried me as I tried to remain calm and make small talk. "So, how's your wrist?" I asked. "Oh my wrist, that was so long ago. Its fine. Don't worry, it's probably just a sprain. This happens to me all the time," he said. We talked about pain and sprains and I hugged him before we sped off.
Bloody aftermath
A few days later, my foot had swollen to about the size of a small loaf of bread. I wrapped it and had been taking ibuprofen, which didn't help at all. I had tried very hard to remain calm, but the pain was so intense and there seemed to be no end to the swelling. I started to worry that it might explode, because it felt that thats what it wanted to do. My brother the medic examined at my foot and felt a weak pulse in it, which was a good indication that it wasn't badly broken. He diagnosed a type III sprain, or a fracture. Fuck. I was still going with the sprain.
Dave D. had come over to visit and brought over some crutches. "I'm out of here!" I proclaimed as I bounced out of bed to stand on my leg. I felt something shift just under my knee from my ankle movement and got the chills. I continued to bury that thought, then proceeded to crutch around town.
I was lying propped up with ice tucked all around my ankle, which was throbbing and still swelling. I looked at it in horror and felt my blood grow colder. My emotions were bottoming out and I don't actually remember much of that evening at all, but was told later on that I was cranky beyond belief, picked several fights and insulted my boyfriend's art. I am still ashamed of it. It was the pain! All I can truly recall was the feverish sweating and the deepest agony in my bones, drifting in and out of dreams that started with the sound of that *SNAP* that I heard when my ankle twisted and evolved into a gallery of terror and dread. In one of my dreams, I was a galloping black horse and I heard a sharp crack, then collapsed in a pool of cold icy blood as I was shot in the leg. In another, I was a person in midstride hearing battle cries, then cut down fallen to my knees when an axe swung fast at my ankle and it crunched, in a red and orange swirl of heat. I woke up sobbing, at which point J. picked me up and carried me into a cab headed for the emergency room.
A couple of vicodins later things were still unreal, but at least my nerves were calm. My temperature was a few degrees colder than normal. I looked at the x-rays of my foot with the radiologist, who pointed out the place on my fibula where the bone had broken cleanly. The prognosis was 6-8 weeks with perhaps a surgery to repair the broken tendons by the small bones in my foot. "So it was broken!" I said with wonder. Denial is strangely comfortable, but coming to the bottom of things is way more satisfying. No wonder why I couldn't walk on it, duh. The emergency room doctor came around with strips of plaster to splint my leg and told me to roll over on my stomach.
"You want some more painkillers? I can get you some."
"No thanks. I think I'm going to puke from the ones I already took."
"You know, this splint is going to be pretty big when I finish setting it. Do you want a, uh, hospital gown? Because otherwise you might have to cut your pants off with some scissors when you get home."
"There is no way I am going to traipse around here in a hospital gown," I said, eyeballing the gangbanger moaning in the bed across the hall with his chest wrapped up around his stab wounds, and the old man lurched up next to him gaping across the way. "I would rather die, and I will sacrifice my pants not to have to do that. Could you just fix my foot and make sure to set it straight, please?"
The events proceeded with an awkward silence until I could finally get up and hobble away. I felt like Sophocle's punchline to the Oracle of the Sphinx's riddle to Oedipus, the "What walks on four feet than two feet than three feet?" I've healed fast from every injury I've ever had, and look at this as a good opportunity to make my ankles more solid, and stronger. I come from the sort of people who maniacally think that abusing the fine lines between life and death is loads of great fun and the only way to live, and that painful situations are useful as ninja training. I'm using all the hopping around that I'm doing on the good leg to build up strength so I can nollie on it and the balance to help do better nose manuals.
