True Story

We can never know for sure exactly what we will do in a given situation until and unless we are actually in that situation. I learned this firsthand when I was 13, and my ten year old brother broke his arm. He had been taking a shower. My mother and I were downstairs in the kitchen, when we heard a loud thump, followed immediately by horrendous yelling. I ran upstairs as fast as I could, opened the bathroom door, and saw my brother laying on his stomach, looking in horror at his arm. I will spare you the gory details. Suffice it to say, his arm was badly broken and it was horrific.

I never could have predicted how I would react. I regret to say, that I did not immediately rush to help the poor kid. I took one look at his arm, turned on my heel, and left the room. I shut the door behind me. I stood outside the bathroom for a few seconds, doing I am not sure what-collecting myself? I had never seen anything so horrific before, and I must have been in some kind of shock. As I stood outside the bathroom, two choices emerged clearly in my mind: I could either totally freak over the horror of what I had just witnessed, or I could I pull it together and help my brother. After a few or several seconds, my brother said in a very calm but assertive way, “Judy, you get back in here and you help me right now.” I immediately went back in and spent the next couple of hours calmly, and I like to think, competently tending to my little brother.

Believe it or not, I ended up being a source of calm in that situation, which was good, because when my mother saw his arm, she totally freaked. She spent the next couple of hours sobbing her eyes out, and telling my brother that she wished it had happened to her and not to him, which was so incredibly sweet. I was much calmer than my mother was, but when I heard my mother say that, all I could think was, “Better you than me, kid: better you than me.” I don’t feel good about that, but it might illustrate one of the differences between a mother and a slightly older sister.

The reason my poor brother was cared for by my mother and me for a couple of hours after breaking his arm was because it happened during the worst ice storm imaginable. My Mom couldn’t get the car out of the driveway. My Dad couldn’t get his car out of the parking lot at his work. The ambulances were all God knows where. Eventually, a police car arrived at the house and took us to the hospital.

My brother later told me that when he first broke his arm, he couldn’t feel a thing. He wasn’t yelling because of any pain. He couldn’t feel any pain. He was yelling because he was just so horrified by how his arm looked. That didn’t last very long, though. Once I walked back into the bathroom, he immediately calmed down, and his thoughts turned to basketball. He kept looking at my mother and me, and saying “Maybe it’s only sprained?” He knew that a sprain would heal quicker than a break. The poor kid knew that a break would take him out of basketball for the rest of the season, and he wept at the thought of it. He told me later that he wasn’t crying because of any physical pain. He wasn’t feeling any physical pain. He said that he was distraught by the prospect of missing out on basketball, and I totally believe him. The whole time, all the kid talked about was basketball and how maybe his arm was not really broken but only sprained.

It was very, very broken. He missed most of basketball season that year, but he was still high scorer for his team, by a lot. My little brother was very good at basketball 🙂