Thursday, May 31, 2007

The Sad Broken Leg Story

Well, Blog World, my son has broken his leg. He managed to make it through 21-and-a-half years of life without breaking anything, which is just astounding in the rough-and-tumble world of boys, but today his luck ran out.

There is no good time to break a leg, of course, but as far as he's concerned, this is about the most inappropriate time possible. He had procured a job with a friend of his who is a mason, and who was prepared to give him work all summer long for as many hours as Jamie wanted and could fit in around his recording work. And who was paying him extremely well for such work, because tradesmen, craftsmen like masons, make extremely good money for what they do. For the past couple of weeks my son has been burning the candle at both ends, hefting rock from 8 to 4 and then recording well into the night, and been happy as a clam doing so. He was really enjoying working his young muscles during the day and doing his music at night, and who needs sleep when you're 21 years old?

But now that's ground to a halt. Not sure yet how long the cast will be on. I don't even know if he knows, because he's angry and frustrated and completely unapproachable at the moment. I did manage to determine that it's his fibula he broke. The obliging tech printed off a copy of his x-ray for him and even we laypeople can clearly see a clean, diagonal break right across the bone, high up, near the back of his knee.

He broke it working for the mason this morning. Again, I don't know too many details yet, but it seems he was pushing a stone-laden wheelbarrow down a grass slope and some sort of disaster occurred. He was in considerable pain, but figured he'd pulled a muscle or something, so he drove himself home (well, it's his left leg and the car has an automatic transmission!) and took some convincing to go to the doctor. He just wanted one of my T3s, a bit of a lie-down, and figured he'd be back at work tomorrow.

I must say he received excellent and prompt health care all the way along the line. The clinic doctor correctly predicted the break, the wait at the x-ray clinic was brief, and the cast (currently a removable fiberglass one) was applied very quickly. All we ever hear are the complaints of people waiting two or three days to have broken legs attended to. Jamie didn't even wait an hour.

Anyway, one of those character-building life lessons, I suppose. We moms wish the character could be built without such setbacks, though.

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