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Kinetic Experience:

Nick Hoeper-Tomich

            I am flying. I look around and see the ski lift going up to the right, cold bare pine trees on both sides and my landing behind me. I begin to realize that this would not end well because I need to land on the landing. My brain tells my body to tuck and do damage control i.e. falling in the least painful way, my body responds and I tuck in slightly and bend my knees. This is when I realize that the large white thing rushing up at me is the hard, icy ground. I have just enough time to say, "OH FUCK!!" I hit the ground and bounce several times, everything goes black for a second then returns back to normal. I try to stand up but I am unable to use my right arm for the required leverage. Whenever I try to move my arm I feel the two halves of my humerus grinding together. "Are you okay?" my friend Alex shouts from down the hill. "Fuck no, I think my arm is broken!" I reply. "Oh Fuck!" was the only answer that Alex can come up with. I begin to get really cold and numb, I thought that I was paralyzed.

            The ski patrol arrives just when I feel my right arm begin to throb. "Are you okay? What day is it? What is your name?" They bombard me with questions while checking for a brain injury. One of them feels all my vertebrae while another pokes

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around my arm. "Does this hurt?" he asks as he presses my right arm. "No" I respond and he moves his hand farther up my arm and gives it a squeeze; a wave of burning white hot pain shoots from where he grabbed my arm. I manage to say "Holy fuck that hurts." The patrol officer stops squeezing. "This may hurt a little," he says as he gets ready to load me into the sled. He bends my arm into a ninety degree angle and a shooting pain courses up my arm. He rolls me into the sled and I pass out for a few seconds.

            When I fully recover consciousness I am at the lodge's emergency care center. My mom is standing nearby and I weakly give her a thumbs up. The nurse approaches my bed asking, "how does your arm feel?" I say that it hurts like a motherfucker. He responds by taking out a syringe and injecting into my IV tube. All of a sudden every pore in my body is on fire, I have to pee, and I feel sick to my stomach, but the pain in my arm goes away. "I just injected you with a little morphine, it should hurt a little while your body gets used to the chemicals." The next five minutes was the worst time of my life.

            My ambulance arrives after about twenty minutes of waiting. The morphine has kicked in completely and I just don't care about anything anymore. I drift in and out of consciousness.

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My mom is still there when  I arrive at the hospital. The morphine has worn off and I am reminded of my arm by a sharp stabbing ache. The doctor cuts me out of my shirt and I look over at my arm. There is a large lump just under the skin that doesn’t belong there. I look over to my mother who looks scared and worried. I try to comfort her by making a couple of jokes but she doesn’t respond. The doctor says something about needing a few X-Rays and then leaves the room. I look around the room; I am surrounded by blinking LCD screens and the monotony of dull off-white walls. I look up at the heart monitor and watch as the line rises and falls. I decide to play a little joke on my mom. I hold my breath and watch as my heart-rate falls, my mom notices and freaks out. I laugh, but she doesn't seem to take my joke as being funny.

            A nurse enters my room and wheels me out to the X-Ray room. She props my gurney up under a big light and a huge clicking white X-Ray machine. The machine buzzes and clicks and I feel a strange sensation run through my body. The nurse comes out and moves the lead belt that covered most of my body. I wince with pain as she shifts my arm for the next angle. She returns to her alcove and the machine buzzes again.  "All done now; the X-Ray should be ready in 5 minutes," she calls from her alcove. Another nurse wheels me back into the dull monotony of my room. I try to sleep.

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"I have to take a piss!" I exclaim to no one in particular. Nobody responds and I realize just how helpless I am. My mom has left to the water cooler and all I can do is struggle to keep it in and wait. Time passes very slowly and the monotonous blips of the heart monitor are almost hypnotic. I begin to fall asleep.

            I am awakened from my stupor by the voice of the doctor. "I just took a look at the X-Ray and appears that you have a displaced fracture of the humerus, we will need to put you under and set the bone." By "putting under" he meant using a drug similar to morphine that instead of desensitizing you it just affects your memory. They inject the drug into my IV and I go to sleep. This is not a normal kind of sleep, I am in a half-sleep and can hear the voices of the doctor and nurses but cannot understand what they are saying. I feel an incredible pain in my arm accompanied by grinding and cracking sounds. I hear the doctor say something. Thirty seconds later more of those horrible sounds occur. I slowly wake up when the meds wear off. I look over at my mom and her face is ghost-white. "Everything is okay, I did not feel any pain." I lie. The doctor says that he needs to do another X-Ray.

            The same nurse wheels me into the same X-Ray room, under the same machine and puts the same lead belt on. The machine clicks and buzzes, then the nurse comes out and wheels me back to my room. The doctor returns and says, "It appears that the

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fracture did not set properly so we will need to do the procedure again." "Oh Boy" is all I can say. He injects the same chemical into my arm and I fall into the same half sleep and I feel the same pain in my arm. I awaken to find myself in the X-Ray room again. The machine clicks and buzzes and the nurse wheels me back into my off-white room. I look down at my arm and see that it is now wrapped up in ACE bandages and has a fiberglass splint. My mother looks like she could not watch another attempt to set the fracture. I am not sure if I could take it either.

            The doctor says that the bone is now set and splinted and that I can go home. My mom helps me up and we walk slowly down the cold, gray hallway and out into the frigid winter air of Lake Tahoe. I shiver because the doctor had cut my shirt and thermals off. I get into the car and go back to the cabin. When we arrive my friend asks how I am feeling. "Super duper," I respond weakly. I am to drugged out to do anything. I sit down in front of the TV and watch whatever is on. I can't even use the remote. My mom decides to make pot roast for dinner. Unfortunately I can't keep any of the delicious food down and quickly throw it all up. I decide that since I can't eat anything I might as well go to sleep. My tucks me in but I can't get comfortable, I keep waking up.        

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The next morning my mom and dad wake me up and help me out into the car. As soon as my ass hits the bucket seat I fall asleep. I wake up when we pull up into my family's driveway. I get out of the car and lurch inside like a drunken zombie.

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This whole experience was a few weeks ago. I have just spent two weeks at home spaced out on Vicodin and playing Need For Speed Underground 2. My first day back at school was really bad. I was still was on Vicodin for the pain and walked around the school completely stoned. Before my return my brother had told everybody in most of my classes about my injury. When I arrived at Mr. Fong's AP Biology class I was greeted with balloons, hugs and Mr. Fong had even pinned a copy of my X-Ray up on the wall.

            School is back in session and the difficulty curve is similar to running into a brick wall. I can't write, my arm hurts, I missed lots of material, I have three tests to make up, basically my life sucks. Not being able to write is the worst thing in the world. I can't do any of my homework without tediously one-hand typing it out on a computer. I can no longer take notes on my two AP classes and I can't walk down the halls without getting my arm painfully jostled.

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          I am no longer invincible, I can no longer do stupid things. I am only human and I am bound by the laws of nature. Breaking my arm has not slowed me down. From it I have learned that even with one arm you can still live your life with relative normality. I have now fully recovered and am looking foreword to the upcoming snowboarding season. It is El Nino this year which means gnarly powder dumps in the Sierra Nevada. Sick.