When I was six years old, I flew. The only problem was, I had my eyes closed.
The outcome of this flight was two broken bones and another fractured one. A numbness and then a pain. It’s what is expected when you man a downhill homemade zipline at a friend’s house. I had let go when the wire hit the metal stopper and opened my eyes to a broken wrist. What followed was surgery, stitches, a pin and a cast. I went to school with chunky plaster covering my right arm and was greeted by 20 or so get-well-soon cards from my classmates. I was the centre of attention. It wasn’t too bad.
I was expected to be in the cast for three weeks. However, what followed could only be described as the plot of some early 2000s cult body horror film. Not only did I come down with a terrible case of gastroenteritis but the arm got infected. The pain was excruciating, the isolation miserable and the cartoons were becoming repetitive. But finally, after a rather lengthy ordeal, I was finally permitted release from my bindings.
Have you ever approached a six year old with an electric buzzsaw? It will give you a fascinating insight on the fight-or-flight response. By the supposed end of my treatment I had drummed up a reputation in the hospital, of being a bit of a drama queen, crying whenever a doctor came at me with saws to crack open my cast and see what the damage was. It got so bad, that my mother had to wear the same grey v-neck whenever there was a doctor’s appointment and so was dubbed The Crying Shirt. With the final whirr, the saw broke open the cast. Modern medicine had triumphed once again. The stitches had sealed the surgery wound and the pin had knitted together the damaged bones. All that was left was the removal of the pin.
My doctor was a rather domineering German man, with a loud presence and a stereotypical accent. His gruff voice scared me and his hands always seemed to examine my arm with almost no respect for the fact that it was quite delicate. I don’t know if he remembered but I had in fact broken a few bones. But he was a doctor. He knew what to do and I was a six year old who wanted to play with his friends once again. So, when he yanked the pin so hard and accidentally re-broke my wrist, I had a few words to say about it.
Actually I didn’t. Once again, The Crying Shirt was put to use and my screams echoed the sterile halls of MoBay Hope Hospital. Unfortunately, my now slightly spoilt reputation as a thespian of the melodramatic vein resulted in (what can only be described as) an under-reaction.
“Oh! Those guttural screams that can only be likened to a wild animal caught in a bear trap? That’s just Charlie.”
An X-Ray later finally revealed that my war-cries were actually justified. The German Doctor had accidentally re-broken my wrist. The German Doctor had denied accidentally re-breaking my wrist. The German Doctor was no longer consulted.
The arm eventually healed after a few consultations with a doctor in Kingston called Dr Saw (who despite the name and my fear, did not have an agenda of amputating six year old boys). Finally my arm was healed and I was able to venture back into the playground, just in time for Christmas.
Two scars still sit on my wrist - a long line where the stitches used to be and a blob that indicates where the battle site of the pin was. They’re often a conversation starter, even if the conversation starts with “Eww what’s that on your arm.” (A line actually uttered by Dr Saw on first inspection of my wrist).
Despite the rigid cast and the stagnant placing of my right arm, I really was shaped in those three months. I taught myself to be ambidextrous as I’d broken my writing hand (forever claiming the title despite losing the skills after no longer practicing it).
I also became more wary. That childlike abandon where you throw yourself off ziplines and up trees began to seem like a site of dangerous possibilities, where German doctors hid behind trees ready to pin and stitch you up like some sort of rag doll. Sports and heights were no longer places of adventure, they were places of weakness, where in a second I could be broken and snapped again. I didn’t want to go outside, not because I’d rather be indoors but because I was scared. It took a while for that to wear off, and unlike all my friends (all who also broke limbs and noses and toes and fingers but probably weren’t attacked by a power-mad medical professional) I approached things with an over-wariness, a fear of being broken. I became a bit of a coward.
However years later, I did find myself strapped to a zipline; this time with harnesses and guides and the faux enthusiasm of any worker at a Jamaican tourist attraction. No longer a makeshift wire going downhill, I skimmed through the treetops with a white helmet on my head (hairnet included). There was lots of shouting and laughing and I had almost completely forgot about the time when a zipline had ruined a good chunk of my life.
And yet, it was never quite that feeling of real flying I achieved the first time. Never that true weightlessness. Maybe my eyes shouldn’t have been closed after all.