Have you ever broken a bone?

Yes, and it sucked very much. I’m very fortunate that it happened when I was younger so that I could bounce back quickly, both mentally and physically.

Growing up in Suburbia in the 90’s and early 2000’s meant it was a lot more common for kids to start getting into skateboarding and other “extreme” sports. I was probably 10 when that started for me.

There was a new family that had just moved in a few houses down and they had two boys. One around my age and the other a teenager. Both were primarily into skateboarding/snowboarding and BMX but dabbled in rollerblading. My younger brother and I became friends with them, and naturally got into skateboarding and rollerblading as well.

A couple years after we started down that path with them was when I broke my left wrist. Our friends had built their own little quarter pipe, only about two feet tall and not very steep. It was meant to help us get the feel of dropping in and going up to start tricks. You can probably imagine where this is going.

It was the night before my twelfth birthday, just before 7:00 PM, when it happened. We were using the quarter pipe to practice spinning, and we were going off the side into the grass so we could land vertically on our feet. Taking turns, we’d run down the driveway as fast as we dared to try and get enough height to complete our spins. I went up once and came down just fine, except for a weird tingle in my left arm. I didn’t think anything of it because it felt just like when you hit your funny bone. My turn came up again and I went for a repeat. I landed the way I was supposed to, on my feet, but I knew immediately something was wrong. My arm was broken. Just an inch or so below the wrist. My left radius was broken, and it was such a weird break (to me) because it made my wrist bulge in a way it most definitely shouldn’t but without breaking skin. The short end of the break sat “on top” of the rest. Complete separation. The long part of my radius, when looking at the x-rays, appeared to be trying to go around the broken part and towards my thumb.

A part of my sixth grade year, moderately ruined for a few months, because I actually had to go through two casts. They tried a short cast at first but they did new x-rays part way through the healing to make sure it was lining up correctly, and unfortunately it wasn’t. The break had started to shift inward towards my ulna. So, they cut off the short cast, did some kind of pinching between the bones to push them away from each other and realign my radius, and then put me in a full cast so my elbow was locked in place.

That was a tough time to be a kid, but I made do with video games that I could play without seriously needing both hands.

Anyways, I stopped skating entirely at that point.