By Edward Master
I don’t recall that any of my childhood cronies had any serious injuries during our playing days of growing up in
Turkey City. I believe I was the only one to survive a broken bone. No one died nor lost an arm as the in movie “Fried Green Tomatoes.”
I don’t remember why I had the compulsion to hop down from Bones’ pickup truck. I jumped from the truck’s left back fender to a bank with an almost non-existent incline under the big pine tree near our front porch. I landed on my two feet and my two hands. My left wrist snapped into an “s-shaped” arm. Bones (Ivan Best) and my dad loaded me into the front seat of Bones’ truck and off we went on the back way (the shortest way, but probably bumpiest way) to the “old” Oil City Hospital.
I must have been admitted quickly. I don’t remember much about the hospital stay. It was late August and I was waiting to begin grade six at the school in Foxburg. Dr. Theodore Koenig in Knox was my family practitioner and he eventually told me I’d have a cast in a sling for at least six weeks. That six weeks seemed to go on forever.
One thing I do recall, however, is that I didn’t have much of an itch problem with my arm encapsulated in a cast. My wife relayed to me that she too had a broken wrist when she was a youngster and she somehow managed to slip a piece of chocolate into her cast. She commented the scene was ‘nasty’ when the cast came off. I had a piece of the cast over my left palm. I think I wore the cast into October. I believe I wore a cast until the Pirates beat the Yankees in the World Series. I believe the healing process was eight or 10 weeks. Much longer than I had hoped for.
I never had any problems with mobility in my left wrist. I was a catcher in softball and baseball and wore my mitt on my left hand. I could easily use my left hand for shooting if need be in basketball (the left-handed hook shot and layup). I worked up to a 365-pound bench press in weightlifting. My shoulders acted up a bit to stop the heavier weights overhead, never the left wrist.
Fortunately, changes in humidity also never bothered me. My mother once told me she saw the doctor’s name (who had set my wrist bones) in the paper for some reason. I guess he did a good job as I never had any problems.
For the most part, I’ve managed to avoid hospitals until after I retired. Now I have a small plethora of pills and a hole in my throat. My life in the hospital is another story.
Speaking of sports
Are the Pirates on or off track? I hope they’re on, but I’m not expecting much. This time I have some hope in saying “wait until next year.”
Lily Tomlin’s reign in The Burgh may be dangerously close to coming to an end. This year could tell much. Nothing much coming from the Pens camp other than they just traded a prospect.
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