If memory serves, I left off last week while I was trying to breathe after the second piece of moleskin had been yanked off my leg following a leg-straightening procedure.
The nurses spent quite a bit of time trying to clean off the residual adhesive and putting a lotion on my leg to soothe the skin. Then they declared me overly ripe and sent me down to the “bath room” to get properly clean. (I’ve always wondered about that bath room—and it was very definitely two separate words. It was about 10 feet by 14 feet and had a large bathtub dead center. Nothing else. Not a chair or even a hook for a towel.) I have to admit I felt very refreshed when I emerged, but the tub needed some serious work.
By the time I was washed, dried, dressed and back to my bed, a transporter was there to take me to a prosthetics workshop. It was in a part of the medical complex I had never been in before, and to be honest, I’m not too sure where it was located. Passageways and tunnels connected more than a half-dozen buildings, and it was often hard to tell the difference between them. Ambiance was not an overriding concern to the hospital’s administration, and the whole place had the feel of one of Vlad the Impaler’s playrooms made up to look like a World War I U-boat. Every place seemed pretty much like every other place except for what implements were hanging on the walls and whether there were windows. I think the workshop was in one of the basements.
Welcome to My Workshop
A man dressed in street clothes and wearing a denim shop apron measured every possible length, width, circumference and thickness there was to measure between my upper thigh and my toes—both with my pants on and off. He measured the angle my leg was locked at about 28 times and verified the amount of play there was in the joint about 30 more times. He checked how much I had weighed over the last year and how fast I had been growing. He asked me what kinds of things I liked to do and frowned prodigiously when he found out I was in the Boy Scouts. Then he said he’d see me in a couple of days. I was just glad the transporter knew the way back to the ward.
A couple of days later, I was back in the workshop. The man with the measurement mania came in carrying a brace. It was huge. It was big enough for Dick the Bruiser and a couple of friends. I had hoped for something a bit discreet that would fit nicely inside my pant leg. That was not going to be an option.
I’ve tried to write a coherent description of the thing about four or five times now, and each one has been more confusing than the last. About the only good thing that came out of the attempts is that I think I might have given Word’s grammar Nazi a nervous breakdown. Suffice it to say that the brace was a nightmarish collection of leather, sheepskin, belts, buckles, turnbuckles and steel. It quite clearly had been built to hold something in a way that something didn’t really want to be held. It had the discreet subtlety of an iron lung, which for some reason is what I thought of the first and every time I saw it.
For several weeks, I wore that thing almost all the time. I was even supposed to wear it when I slept, which had all the charm of trying to sleep with a bit of railroad track strapped to your leg, but without the romance. Even sitting in a chair was a challenge. Every few days, the turnbuckles would be given a quarter-turn to force my leg just a little bit straighter. On today’s ubiquitous 1-to-10 scale for pain, it only rated a 2, but it was a 48 for constantly annoying.
Puberty Hits
This was, of course, during that fragile period in a young boy’s life known as puberty. For reasons not yet fully explained to me in Life Adjustment class, and only mentioned in passing by my parents, usually while grinning way too much, things were beginning to occur over which I had no control and even less understanding. Hair had begun sprouting here and there, but in no discernable pattern. Not really proper hair, but a kind of deformed fuzz that gave you more of an aura of mange than maturity. And I had begun noticing that some of the differences about girls were exciting in ways that were as surprising as they were mysterious. And here I was walking around with the Eiffel Tower strapped to my left leg. Now, the Eiffel Tower in Paris is, by all accounts, very cool, but trying to dance to Santo and Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” while dragging the Eiffel Tower along is very definitely uncool. Clearly, something was going to have to be done.
[Steps for Living: Understanding Puberty]
As soon as it got warm enough to go swimming, I started spending my weekends down at The Pit. Since I didn’t have to wear the brace while I was swimming, I would stay in the water for as long as possible. When school let out for the summer I practically lived at The Pit. My mother had some pretty strong opinions about just lying about on the beach. She figured if I was going to loll about in the sun, I could just as easily do it at home and perhaps mow the lawn or weed the garden while I was at it. I didn’t entirely follow her logic, but the gist of her argument was fairly clear. So instead, I spent as much time as possible swimming to the raft and back, coming ashore just often enough to prevent hypothermia.
After a few weeks, we noticed that my leg was actually able to move a little. It was just a few degrees at first, but as the summer went on, the movement increased. As my leg continued to loosen up, I began being a bit lax about wearing the brace. My leg kept improving, and Mom and Dad and I talked it over one evening at supper. The consensus was that since I had the brace because my leg had been frozen in place, and now I was almost able to ride a bike again, we would give the brace a rest and see how things went.
By the time swimming season ended, I had swum about 1,000 miles, and I was able to ride my bike to The Pit the last couple of weeks. By the time school started, everything was back to what I considered normal. I did, however, have some trouble with that knee wanting to give out around the first time I asked a girl to dance—the song just happened to be “Sleepwalk”—but Dad said that was unrelated.
Read more Guy Boss at the Missing Factor.