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“It’s just a sprain. It’ll swell a bit, and it will be a few days before you can walk on it, but you’ll be all right.” He smiled. “I don’t think you’ll be able to go to school till sometime next week.”
That was on Friday. By Sunday morning, the ankle looked like it had become trapped inside a small, exotic melon, smooth skinned, black and blue with streaks of bruised yellow. Reluctantly, my father consulted pages 752 to 755 in Volume One, and conceded that his earlier diagnosis had been incorrect. It was a fracture and ought to be seen to by a professional. The next stop would be the emergency ward at the Medical Center. He carried me down the two flights of stairs, eased me into the back seat of our forty-nine Ford sedan, and drove me and my mother to the hospital, but decided he would just wait in the car. That’s when I remembered that Hephaestus was a god who sometimes tripped over his own feet.
The next thing I knew, I was being hefted up onto a white table in a white room in very white light and talking with a young man dressed in white with blond hair and a stethoscope bobbing from one of his white jacket pockets. He was cheerful and chatty, interested in sports, and kept me engaged in conversation while his cold fingers probed for and registered the damage to my immensely inflated foot. He smiled, and asked me in a friendly way if I could just scoot up a bit, and when I did, he put both hands on my ankle, which was now extended over the end of the table, and drove down with all his weight. I screamed and fainted.
When I came to a few moments later, the pain was gone and he apologized. The break had begun to heal, but the parts were not properly aligned and had to be broken again so they could be re-set. A nurse brought in a large white basin in which there were wet rags in a bath of white sludge. The intern wrapped my ankle with gauze then applied the saturated cloths which grew warm and hardened as the water evaporated. When he was done, he knocked on the cast with his knuckles. That should do you, he said. Then he told me the good news. I’d have to stay home from school and off the foot for a month. Then they’d attach a heel under the instep and I could hobble around with crutches and my classmates could write their names and good wishes (also, I thought, a lot of other stuff) on the hard surface to cheer me up. After six or eight weeks, it would be removed and I’d be an athlete again. Yeah, I thought. An athlete. A wrestler with pubescent tomboys.
Libros Libertad 