Rakkity

The Beeper

When I landed on my wrist two Saturdays ago, the last thing on my mind was the wristwatch on my wrist. But after the impact, and as I staggered towards the back door, an image remains strong in my memory— a free-standing white watch dial lay on the ground, its face disfigured by broken glass, and the wrist band lay elsewhere, apparently broken away from the dial. Several hours later, lying on a hospital gurney, I mentioned the destroyed watch to Beth. She hated that watch because it beeped every hour on the hour, and couldn’t be stifled. Sometimes I would forget to take it off before going to bed, and Beth would be woken up by a plaintive “Beep!”. Not a loud beep, but enough to wake Beth up (but not me) from a sound sleep. I’d be snoring away, and would wake up just a little while Beth peeled the watch off my wrist to take it downstairs. So when she heard that it was destroyed in my fall, she said, “Great! Glad to hear something good happened today.”

Seized

“Just hold your arm out here and I’ll remove the splint”, Dr. Pyfrom said while I sat down on the examination bench.. My left arm seemed heavier than usual, and as the Ace bandage was unrolled, it got heavier and heavier. Finally the cut Dr. Pyfrom had made 14 days previously was revealed. I was astounded and repelled by the appearance of my arm, with all those staples jabbed through puffy, bloody flesh. Now my arm felt like a lead poker, and I asked Beth for some support. Like the good nurse that she is, she held her strong arms out under my weak one, while Dr. P. swabbed the arm with alcohol, and said soothing words about how well it was healing. It may have been healing, but suddenly I felt clammy all over. Then he said, “How about the right hand?”, as he started to slide a gentle finger down the slightly swollen back of my hand. Then he hit a sore spot. The room went black. Dr. P. and Beth started calling to me as I fell back against the wall. I must have been out for a second or two. After the shock of seeing my left arm, getting some bad bones probed in the right arm pushed me over the edge. Afterwards, Beth said to me, “it was just like an epileptic siezure. I thought to myself, am I now going to have to live with an epileptic?”

Q and As

Number 10: “Whoa! What’d you do to your wrist!”, asked my summer intern, Rick, as I entered the office. “Well, I was standing up high on a ladder in my back yard cutting off a big limb with a chainsaw, blah, blah, blah… And when the branch broke, the tree kicked the ladder forward, and I lost mt grip,… adboringinfinitum…Then apparently I landed on
top of my wrist, which bent into a z shape…etc, etc. Number 20: “Hey, Ed, what happened to you arm?”, a fellow astronomer, asks me in the hall. “Well, I was on a ladder in my back yard cutting a tree limb with a chainsaw, and when the branch broke, the tree kicked back. Then I landed on my wrist.

Number 30: “What happened to your hand?” asks the Starbucks barrista. “I fell off a ladder while cutting a tree, and landed on my wrist.”

Number 40: “How’d you hurt your hand?”, asks the clerk at IKEA. “Fell off a ladder.”

Number 50: “What’s with the cast?”, asks some random person tomorrow. “Ladder.”

The Radiologist

Beth and I walked into the radiology office with Dr. Pyfrom’s order for X-rays of my right hand. After a short time, I was called into the X-ray room and sat in the only chair, right next to an enormous black table with a preying-mantis X-ray source machine hovering over it. The radiologist came in, and asked, “What happened to your wrist?” (See Q&A 25 above.) Without any comment, she grabbed my left wrist and tried to turn my palm flat down on the table. I shouted, and simultaneously stood up to allow my elbow to rotate the hand. You see, there are two pins in the lower part of my wrist that prevent the normal rotation (that I will get back again), like when you turn a doorknob. It’s painful for me or any other external force to try to rotate it, and if that wasn’t the only thing, I would have felt my wrist bones rubbing against each other. But she had failed to realize that I have only a half cast, and the stapled region is protected only by gauze and an Ace bandage, so her grasp was was right onto the staples. She may have apologized, but I didn’t notice. After two X-rays of the left hand, I said, “What about the right hand?” She looked at me funny, and went out to check Dr. P’s order form. She returned with a disgruntled look on her face, and with no comment, X-rayed my right hand. When Beth and I got the films a few minutes later, there were none of the left hand. Darn. That would have been much more interesting.

The Return

We were all sitting around the dining room table, and Katie came from the back yard where she had been cleaning up the debris around the accident site. Something grey dangled from her hand. “Look what I found”, she said. It was the dreaded watch, and not only did it appear to be intact, but it wasn’t anything like the watch of my imagination. Being digital, it had no face. Talk about false memories! The watch didn’t stay around long enough for us to find out if it beeped. Silently, Beth consigned it to the deeps of the waste bin.