Tikkabik

I don't usually cotton to superstition, but yesterday was a decidedly unlucky Friday the 13th for us. The kids have been at camp all week -- a Girl Scouts camp, actually, but they had a boy's unit and a unit for preschoolers, so both James and Bob were able to go as well. Bonnie's a troop leader, so she had an opportunity to work with older girls than the Brownies she's usually stuck with -- teenagers, in fact.

So it's the last day of camp, and the last couple of hours. James is running down a trail when he trips over a stump and goes head first into the ground. He puts his arm up to protect himself, and ends up slamming hard into the ground. Hard enough that his head acted like a mallet, creating oblique fractures across his ulna and radius, the two major bones in the forearm. James looked like he had grown an extra elbow in between his wrist and his real elbow.

The camp nurse immediately rounded up Bonnie and called an ambulance; it took them a while to show up, because apparently the EMT's didn't know where the camp was. Eventually they got there, stabilized him and got him off to nearby Jordan Hospital.

I picked up the kids, and by the time we caught up with Bonnie and James, the orthopod -- a white-haired guy with 30 years of experience, exactly the sort of doctor you want setting your child's broken bones -- was all set to set the arm and put him in a cast. James was dopey from three hits of morphine and still really uncomfortable (who wouldn't be with an extra elbow where one doesn't belong?), but very brave -- better behaved than another adult who needed to have a bone set that night, according to one of the ER nurses.

It only took about twenty minutes to set the bones and get the cast on, but it was another half hour or so before James was coherent enough to talk with. At first he didn't want to move, but it didn't take too much coaxing to get him out of the hospital bed and into a wheelchair. Bob and Emme were anxious to help, too, which made it a bit easier.

So we got home after 9PM, driving through driving downpours on the way home -- the first significant rainfall we'd seen that week, which, I guess in retrospect, was good in light of the camping activities. James went straight to bed and so did everyone else.

Today, you'd barely know that anything had happened, outside of the big blue cast on James' arm. He's as mobile as ever -- a bit TOO mobile. But a followup X-ray taken at Jordan again this morning showed that the bones are set perfectly -- you can't see any seam or break at all, and James hasn't asked for Tylenol at all, or complained of discomfort, which totally amazes me.

Those who know us well may remember that Bob got a hairline fracture on distal end of his humerus when he was a toddler, from jumping off the sofa and onto the living room floor. It seems that breaking one's arms is some bizarre rite of passage for the Cohen boys. Hopefully only the Cohen boys. And hopefully only once.