I broke my arm on Boxing Day, playing don’t-touch-the-floor tag with my brother. It’s not that the floor was lava, it’s just that the rules are you can only get around by climbing on the furniture. I was doing well until I fell backwards off the top bunk. My arm was sore and very swollen so I knew something really bad had happened. I cried and ran to my mum, who was napping in bed. Unfortunately she’s a psychiatrist and can just about remember some stuff from med school. She tried for twenty minutes to relocate my dislocated arm (it wasn’t – jeepers that was painful!) but eventually she and dad bundled me into the back of the car and drove me to the hospital in Kaitaia, 20 miles away from our old bach. It was night time by then so I think they had to ring someone to come over and turn all the lights on. I met a lovely woman, Doris the xray lady, who said I was very brave, and that I had a supracondylar fracture of my left humerus, and after that all I remember was an injection and then I must have drifted off. When I woke up I started puking, and soon after that I was taken to the ward. They let me go home the next day, but when I was brought back to meet Doris again, everyone started frowning and muttering, and they put me back in the ward again, this time for two weeks in traction. My arm was pulled above my head and attached to a giant frame on the bed and I wasn’t allowed up. It was torture. I almost died of boredom. All the other kids were allowed down to the day room to watch tv all day, but my bed was too big to fit through the door, so I had to just listen to Disco Duck on the radio by myself. A couple of times I decided to run away, but I never got any further than sitting on the edge of the bed before chickening out. Every day the mean nasty nurses would ask me if I’d had a poo, and when I said no, they would give me a tiny paper cup full of chocolate sprinkles. I had no idea what that was all about. One night, I farted in bad and was horrified to have a giant runny poo that squirted all across the bed. I called “Nurse! Nurse!” for hours but no one came. When they finally arrived, they were really grumpy and didn’t say a word to me. I was really embarrassed. My family had all gone home to Auckland by then, so I was really lonely. I tried smarming up to the nurses, but they weren’t having it. One had a badge saying Nurse Gore, which I thought was funny. I had seen her wedding photo at the photographers studio on the Main Street during my brief spell of freedom before being readmitted to the hospital, so I said to her I’d seen it in an attempt to suck up, but she just said to the other nurse in the room “oh is that still there after all this time?” Honestly if these people don’t like children, why do they work with us? Doris was the only friend I made during my entire stay. Sometimes the boys in their room down the hall would call out to me, or wave as they were taken past on their way to the day room, but I never met any of them. Not from less than twenty feet away, anyway. On my last day, after the longest fortnight ever, nurse Gore took my bed out of my room to remove my cast and get it re xrayed, and that’s when she discovered that my bed did fit through the door after all. How funny she found it. I was so upset! How different the last two weeks could have been, making friends, watching TV, just getting out of that room would have made me so happy. The xray was fine, and I was allowed to go home. Then it was just two months in a cast, during a very hot Auckland summer (did you know sticking coins down your cast can temporarily take away the itch? And it makes for a very interesting xray.)
And that’s what I did on my holidays. This year I will work on my paragraphs.