Walk It Off

My parents raised four boys, two girls, three dogs, two cats, six gerbils, a turtle and a bat. Ours was a household filled with love, companionship and mortal danger. If we survived the dog bites, snakebites and kid bites, we still had to contend with smallpox, measles, and mumps – all of which could kill you or seriously hamper your social life. By necessity my mother was adept at the mending of cuts, burns, bee stings, botulism, plague and constipation.

This last affliction was common in the spring and early summer when our apple tree produced thousands of green apples that we were told not to eat but ate anyway. I was just a kid so I didn’t understand why sometimes Mom treated my maladies with a pill that I would swallow, and other times she’d stick the pill up my ass. Then one day I put one and one together and made number two.

Mom’s most common diagnosis was “growing pains.”

“Mom, my back hurts.”

“You have growing pains.”

“Mom, I have a tumor.”

“Growing pains.”

She prescribed the same treatment for every one of our injuries.

“Mom, I broke my arm.”

“Walk it off.”

“Mom, I got bit by a Black Widow spider and I’m going to die.”

“Walk it off.”

In my family, real doctors and hospitals were for sissies. The only exception was when stitches were required. My dad put his foot down when Mom tried to stitch us up at home. He had seen Mom mend buttons and I think he feared our parts might also fall off. I was thankful for Dad’s resolve when a neighbor’s dog sunk his teeth into my knee and the gash required five stitches. The doctor did a nice job and all these years later my knee is still attached.

My siblings and I spent our childhood haphazardly risking life and limb. The neighborhood was filled with hideous machines seemingly designed to amputate the fingers, arms and legs of careless children. The typical swing set of my youth could cause instant death by decapitation, or slow, lock-jawed death by tetanus. On a dare we would throw rocks into a hornet’s nest or grab a snake by its tail. We jumped into abandoned, water-filled quarries with unseeable dangers lurking beneath the surface. In one we discovered a rusty railway car; another had been filled with oil that covered us in slimy rainbows.

One summer we pieced together a go-cart from old lawnmower parts. We used one of those old push mowers for the back axle and wheels. We couldn’t get the rusty blades off, so we left them to spin precariously close to our backsides. When we got the thing started, we drove it back and forth between my yard and Peter Campbell’s yard five houses away. When the neighborhood dads came home from work, they were dismayed to find we had mowed wavy stripes through their lawns. We’d had enough of the contraption by the time Peter got his foot stuck under the back wheel and it mowed a wavy stripe through his ankle. Peter survived intact; the go-cart died a horrible death by hacksaw.

My older brother Jeff and I climbed everything – from the nearby elementary school to a distant radio tower. Jeff achieved the first bona fide compound fracture in the family when he fell from a tree and landed on the picnic table where mom and her friends were enjoying a balanced lunch of Whisky Sours and beer.

In my neighborhood we didn’t play catch with a ball and a glove; we threw rocks, sticks and fireworks. My oldest brother Doug lost half the sight in his left eye when he caught a stick in it. I don’t recall what the moms were drinking for lunch that day.

I thought I had escaped my childhood relatively unscathed (because five stitches can’t compete with a compound fracture or near blindness) but I learned otherwise when I had an x-ray taken of my arm decades later.

The doctor examined the film and asked, “When did you break your arm?”

“Um, I never broke my arm.”

“You sure did. It’s right here on the x-ray.”

As an adult I also learned that I had sustained a compression fracture of the T12 vertebrae and had broken my coccyx bone – twice. The coccyx bone is more commonly known as the tailbone. It’s a vestigial holdover from when our ancestors still had tails, which in my family was around 1927.

I vividly remember the first time I broke my coccyx bone. It happened when I was a third string pole-vaulter on the seventh-grade track and field team. I picked pole-vaulting so I could skip the grueling cross-country workouts that disagreed with my pack a day habit. Hey, don’t judge – sure, I smoked for years but I quit when I turned twelve.

I’d seen pole-vaulting on television and I liked the idea of flopping into a big box filled with cushions. Unfortunately, the pole-vault pit at my school was filled with rotting foam that stuck to your hair like orange dandruff and smelled like overripe Limburger. Our equipment was so old that carbon dating revealed it originated in the Jurassic era, which is a prehistoric time period named after a popular movie.

The highlight of the track and field calendar was the competition in Wheaton, Illinois because they possessed a state-of-the-art inflatable balloon for a pole-vault pit. This meant the cheerleaders actually watched the pole-vaulters instead of the sprinters. And let’s face it, why else would I propel myself thirteen-feet in the air to flop over a bar? I’m more the type to flop myself into a bar.

So, with visions of bobby socks, saddle shoes, and short pleated skirts dancing in my head, I sprinted down the path, slammed the pole into the cement box and felt it yield to my momentum. The pole slowly straightened and like an ascending dove I took flight. Higher and higher I rose. Time slowed as I soared above the bleachers, above the cross bar, and above the awed and speechless cheerleaders gathered below.

I paused at the zenith and admired my textbook pole-vaulter posture – back parallel to the ground and legs reaching for the heavens. If cell phones existed in that triumphant moment, I would have taken a selfie. But it takes more than style points to get over the cross bar and into the comfy embrace of Wheaton’s state-of-the-art inflatable balloon pit. It takes forward momentum and I had run out of it.

I kicked and squirmed like a worm in a robin’s beak but my gyrations did little to propel me forward. Panic sent bayonets of adrenaline into my heart and my chest heaved like a cat coughing up hairballs. My grip loosened and I plummeted like a pole dancer wearing too much talcum powder. I missed the giant inflatable balloon but luckily there was a concrete block to break my fall. I never pole-vaulted again. Not because I ran out of nerve, but because I ran out of similes.

The impact made a horrifying sound that filled the arena. Surprised sprinters stumbled over hurdles and the shot putter threw his ball through a school bus windshield. Stunned cheerleaders stopped mid-chant. When I close my eyes at night, I can still hear that chant … “Gimme an Ooooo my God, did you hear that kid’s ass break!”

The coach rushed over, evaluated the situation and — calling on his extensive professional training and years of experience — gave the following advice, “Walk it off Carter.”

I was so sore that I couldn’t go out and play later that night when the mosquito control truck blanketed the neighborhood in clouds of DDT. I was forced to lay in bed and listen to my friends laughing and retching in joyous rapture. Mom saw the disappointment in my eyes and opened the window so I could share the DDT with my friends. What can I say except, Best … Mom … Ever!

Once I was able to walk upright the coach moved me to the standing broad jump because his extensive professional training and years of experience led him to believe it was impossible to break an ass bone by jumping from a standing position. Obviously, the man had never consumed several bottles of wine and then attempted to prove to a skeptical audience that he possessed X-Men like prowess and could jump ten feet from a standing position in a living room, in his stocking feet, on a slippery floor, on New Year’s Eve.

And so it was that thirty years after I gave up pole-vaulting, I found myself buns up in a hospital emergency room on New Year’s Eve.

The doctor said the coccyx bone could only be examined from the inside, but I didn’t understand what he meant until he slipped on a latex glove and told me to bend over. Suddenly I understood why his name badge said Doctor on Duty. Midway through the examination he said, “Your coccyx bone is broken and not for the first time. Unfortunately, there is no way to fix a broken coccyx bone; you have to walk it off.”

Walk it off! I was shocked – Coach’s extensive professional training and years of experience had been right.

In the following decade I suffered many life-threatening man-colds and near-death hangovers but I avoided serious injury. Then one day my Blackberry buzzed as I was walking down the stairs. I looked down to see that my wife Caroline was calling and my foot missed the last step. I hit the floor; the Blackberry hit the wall. I needed surgery; the Blackberry was fine.

Writhing in pain, I dragged my mutilated body, inch by painful inch, across the floor to my phone. Caroline’s concerned voice rang clear through the throbbing, all-encompassing pain.

“Stop being so dramatic,” she snapped. “Walk it off!”

Those of you with teenage children know why I was carrying a Blackberry years after the advent of the smart phone. My kids snatched every upgrade, leaving me with a new phone about as often as geological time scales change eras. You may remember the Precambrian, the Paleozoic, and the Mesozoic. I refer to that time in my life as the Blackberrozoic era. Back then Blackberry owners were like a cult. While everyone else was showing off their smart phones we were trying to conceal our dumb ones. The stigma of owning a Blackberry was hard to bear but there was comfort in knowing there were others like me who hid the tiny shame in their pants.

As I waited for surgery, I reminisced about my childhood and my many brushes with danger. I grew up on the south side of town where Pall Mall smoking, switchblade toting, Brylcreem wearing greasers were always looking for a fight. I had hiked wild mountain ranges and deserts where I’d confronted rattlesnakes and bears – Pall Mall smoking, switchblade toting, Brylcreem wearing rattlesnakes and bears – and I had stared them all down with steely nerves.

But show me a syringe and suddenly I have irritable bowel syndrome.

My wife was sensitive to my queasiness because she understood that needles were my Achilles heel … well, except that this time my Achilles heel turned out to be my Achilles heel. Caroline sat with me as I waited for surgery which, despite what she said when I first fell, did not require any walking.

The nurse asked about my medical history and I said, “I think my blood type is O but I’m not positive.”

Caroline said, “I can’t believe how calm you are about this surgery.”

“That’s nice of you to say, but I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Oh sure, I understand. It’s just that they’re going to stick that long needle into the back of your hand.”

“Umm, yeah, I’ll be alright … Say, how about those Yankees?”

“Remember how you screamed when they stuck that needle in you for your colonoscopy? Half the people in the waiting room got up and left.”

“Yeah … I, umm … I remember,” I said, mopping fresh perspiration from my brow.

She was quiet for a minute and then added, “How many stitches do you think you’ll need?”

A large lump had formed in my throat. “Caroline … I … I … I …”

“Hey, you’ll be fine.” I heard Caroline’s voice fading away. “This is the same surgeon who performed the last operation on Joan Rivers.”

When I woke up the doctor said it would be a painful, two-month recovery but he would counsel me through the suffering. I asked if he had ever ruptured his Achilles tendon and he said, “No but I’ve been married for forty years and that qualifies me as an expert in suffering.”

I soon discovered that not driving for two months is easy. It’s being a passenger that’s hard. Caroline was such a careful driver that she stopped at the green lights to make sure nobody was thinking about running the red lights. She drove me everywhere during my recovery and until that time I had no idea how many friends she had. Everywhere we went people honked at her.

I was a composed and grateful passenger which means I rarely raised my voice above ninety decibels. Whenever Caroline was at the wheel, I offered lots of, umm … driving observations. I could tell she appreciated my advice because she was so engrossed in what I had to say that she didn’t say a word to me.

Not one word.

For two months.

I thought I had gone deaf. I suspect she didn’t want to miss any of my astute driving pointers.

One day, shortly before I had my cast removed, Caroline broke the silence. We pulled up to a busy intersection and I calmly screamed, “Caroline, this is a stop sign!”

“I stopped,” she replied as she continued to roll into the middle of the intersection.

I pointed to the car stopped on the perpendicular street. “She stopped first. It’s her turn to go.”

“Oh her? She’s just waiting for me to go.”

“No,” I said. “She’s waiting for you to stop!”

“You want me to stop? Okay I’ve stopped. Now get out of the car.”

Dumbfounded, I climbed from the car and looked back through the open window. “I know the perfect remedy for your condition,” she said as she put the car in gear.

As she pulled away I heard her say, “Walk it off.”