The ground seemed to be miraculously elevating towards me, as my face was gradually coming nearer and nearer. No, that was impossible. In a matter of seconds, my entire body had plummeted and smashed into the ground as I lost my my grip on the slippery, green monkey bars above my head. I had been uncontrollably swinging on the bars and had ended up plunging face-first into the pointy, sharp woodchips that immediately clung to my body and clothes. My left arm swung backwards, over my head, and twisted behind my back in an unrealistic way. There was an semi-loud, audible crack. My elbow bone had shattered and split into millions of pieces.


I gasped and cried out loud in extreme pain, too shocked to even explain myself, while trying to bite back the tears that were quickly swelling up. Although my eyes were wide open with disbelief, a fuzzy blackness shrouded my eyes, disabling me to see things around me. An erupting scream was stuck in the back of my dry throat as tidal waves of panic washed over me. With my blood pumping furiously, my heart felt as though it were about to burst with immense adrenaline inside of my tiny, nine-year old body. Shocks of excruciating pain shot up my arm as I struggled to stand up on my unbalanced feet (I wasn’t used to the solidity of the ground after having experienced the gravity of falling). I flinched, thinking that this was just another one of those simple, many accidents, but when I tried using my left arm to lever my body up from the ground, it collapsed. My left arm wouldn’t support my weight at all.

Before I knew it, droplets of raindrop-shaped tears were wildly darting down my stricken face in a frenzy. My left arm was dangling lifelessly by my side, so I gripped it tightly with my other arm, looking as though I had received some severe wound from a gunshot to my arm. My mind was spinning with all kinds of insane contemplations and thoughts, unaware of the people around me. I didn’t even care about my surroundings at that time, because I was so worried. Thousands of images flashed through my brain as I was dragging my feet along the pavement, thinking about all of the terrible outcomes that were in store for me… Because of one, terrible fall.

I forced myself through the heavy, glass doors in the front of the entrance of my middle school without the help of anybody. The consistent pounding of my heart was unbearably noisy and disruptive to my thoughts, but I managed to tiredly and hurriedly set out a fast, quick paced walk to the nurse’s office. The walls were hollowed out and silent. Left, right, left, right. Every large step that I took sounded like atomic bombs being dropped from the heavens above. And every movement that I made, shook my left arm in a very torturous and an unpleasant way, similar to an earthquake. I turned to my right and finally came to a screeching halt in front of a brown, wooden door that had thick, black printing on it: NURSE’S OFFICE.

I painfully withdrew my right hand from my left arm, my fingers being agonizingly stiff and numb from holding onto my arm for so long, and shakily grabbed the shiny doorknob. I turned it slowly and pushed the door open. The creaking door seemed to be screaming and yelling at me with every screeching sound that it made, mocking and taunting me, excitedly exclaiming that my arm was forever broken. I quietly crept into the waiting room with puddles of tears swaying in my confusion clouded eyes. I trembled as I sat and patiently waited.

My eyes rapidly locked with the nurse’s, and somehow, she knew exactly what had happened to me, in the blink of an eye. She saw how desperately I was clutching onto my left arm, and hastily decided to call my father, who was at home. Instantaneously, my worried and stressed out father had come to pick me up. My father was frantically calling my mother, in the car, to alarm her of my accident, as we rushed to the hospital in a few minutes. She promptly and unhesitatingly closed her shop, wanting to tag along to the hospital, where I had to take the most painful x-ray shots.

The so-called “professional” doctor was holding my left arm mercilessly, in the most unbearably painful and torturous positions ever. He took multiple x-ray shots of my broken arm, which seemed to have lasted an eternity. I screamed at the top of my lungs and failed to contain the sweeping agony that had electrocuted throughout my entire body. Tears were leaking out as I started to weep uncontrollably; the pain was unendurable. Soon enough, my left arm was put inside of a blue sling and I was forced to wear a hospital gown, along with having a sharp needle inserted into my weak arm by a nurse (to give my body fluids, I presume). Afterward, I was instructed to wear this clear mask filled with gas that put me into a very deep, sudden sleep; the surgery had started.

Almost half a year had passed and it was time to visit the doctor once again, at the dreaded hospital. The amount of crying and screaming was unimaginable. Gallons of tears and snot were rushing down my face as I sat there on a navy colored bed covered with white wax paper on top of the uncomfortable mattress. There were traces of white powder smothered all over my left arm, remnants of the white cast that had once been wrapped around outside of it. I looked at my arm in disbelief and rubbed my tear-drenched eyes a couple of times to confirm that what I was seeing was a reality. After finding out that this tragic nightmare was indeed true and real, I nearly fainted.

All of the dust and powder from my newly, sawed-off cast, made it tremendously difficult to make out what was lodged inside of my elbow. But soon enough, I found out that these terrible “things” were long, rusty nails that were hammered into my arm during surgery (to help keep my shattered bones in place, while they grow back). I was in such a mess. My hair was sticking to my forehead with sweat, I was dirty from the dust, and my body was trembling with fear. Pathways of tears were marked onto my cheeks, tiny scratches from the saw were engraved onto my skin, and I couldn’t hear anything else except for my constant whimpering and screaming.

The amount of blood was disgusting. Every nail that was getting painfully pulled out from my elbow, with the end part of a hammer, had splashes of blood following after it. There was so much blood that even with the two nurses helping, it was impossible to wipe off, so they eventually let things be and gave up. And sometimes, the nails were so deeply lodged into my elbow, that the doctor had to pull on them harder, with all of his strength. By tugging on them sharply, there was a slight increase in the profuse amount of blood that was overflowing from the cracks. And in the midst of all this chaos, there was me, crying my poor little heart out.

Oh, the joy of playing on playground monkey bars. How thrilling and fun.