Danger

This is one of my favorite stories to tell!! 

Never have I been so alive to the motions of my severed muscles as when I broke my arm on a narrow, mountainous road in India. They say you don't really appreciate things until they're gone, it's too easy to take pieces of your life for granted. You don't appreciate your limbs as much as you should either. 

I was somewhere around like 9 years old. I was in India, 8 days after my birthday on August 8th. It was Raksha Bhandhan, a scared holiday in my Hindu culture where brothers and sisters celebrate their relationship of siblingness. It's one of my favorite holidays, associated with some of the best memories I have of my childhood. 

This year, my big brother and I were celebrating in India, with our other cousins. A big deal. To celebrate, we were all going to a beach-type area, I think. I honestly don't remember anymore where we going, but I remember that the trip was long and we stopped at a few temples along the way. We were at my great-uncle’s- my grandma's younger brother. He was a judge, so he had fancy cars and a driver and a bodyguard with a gun that drove around with him. There were too many of us to fit into one car, so my great-uncle decided to give the kids a treat and we all got to ride with him and his bodyguard in the huge SUV. Maybe it wasn't actually that big, but it felt that way at the ripe young age of 9. Anyway, the four grandkids and my great-uncle all piled into the SUV, 5 of us in the back seat. I was sandwiched between my brother and my cousin, while the rest of our family, including my mother and my uncle, were in another car. 

Earlier in the summer, I had gotten my finger crushed in a door at our cousins’ house. It hurt. Needless to say. It was black and bruised and kinda gross, and I was staring at this finger while my cousin was cleaning smudges off of my glasses, when suddenly the other car hit us. Our driver was skilled enough to steer our car away from the edge of the cliff that we had been on as it skidded and slipped across the highway from the impact of this giant truck of a car. In the crash, I felt myself jolt forward -- I don't remember now if my arm slammed into the front driver's seat or if I stuck it out against the seat in front of me, but probably my arm slammed into it. 

It was utter chaos the next few seconds. Most of it is a haze, but I remember going into instant shock and yet somehow knowing that something was wrong with my arm. It didn't look wrong, it didn't hurt. I didn't process ever slamming into the seat in front of me. I just knew there was something wrong. My cousins questioned me on it after, how I could have possibly figured out that my arm had broken when no one else could tell there was anything wrong. I have no idea. I just knew. When it's your body, you just know things. 

I stuck it out to my great-uncle, he rubbed it and said don't worry, it’s fine, you’re fine. He rotated my shoulder around a little bit, he thought I had just bumped it into the seat and that it was hurting. 

Somehow, we ended up outside the car and I was in the arms of my mother. I wasn't crying, I wasn't in pain. But my arm. What was wrong with my arm? 

I told my mom I needed to lie down. That's when she knew something was wrong. She said to my uncle “She never does this, she never acts like this. Something is wrong.” Her mind probably had gone to the worst - a brain injury or something. I was dazed. In the haziness of my adrenaline-feuled body shutting down, I lifted up my arm to see what was happening. My shoulder was intact, I could lift it. But the rest of my arm was dangling. I went to move the bottom half of my arm, bending my elbow. And - I will never forget this feeling - I felt the muscles contracting and expanding, I saw a phantom arm moving where my arm should have been moving. But instead, my arm below my elbow just dangled. Hung there, like it was completely detached. I could feel the muscles moving and my arm should have moved with them. But it didn't.

A panic should have set in, but even then, I had a fascination with the feeling. This is unreal, is all I kept thinking. Eventually, you could see the bone poking up against the skin. All the women of the family tied my arm up with their scarves, holding the bone in place from moving more. Where they got that level of doctorery, I have no idea. The whole family piled into the other car, rushing to the hospital. At this point I was curled in my mother's lap, unaware of what was happening, falling in and out of sleep. 

Oh but the story goes on. And it gets worse. We were in India during the monsoon season. That meant torrential downpours 24/7 and floods. The whole city we were in was flooded. My great-uncle’s bodyguard carried me into the hospital after they found a wheelchair wouldn't make it through the water. The bodyguard who, by the way, had a deep flesh wound in his pectoral muscle from where his gun had hit him during the impact. 

In the hospital, they laid me down on a table (truly, it's all bits and pieces, I don't even really remember what was happening or when or how) and they started to x-ray my arm. They first did it through the scarves, but eventually they needed to get a clear picture. My arm was cradled into my body, held together by the scarves, and as they unraveled them, blood started to rush into my arm and the pain began. The first time I had ever felt pain during this whole ordeal. And it more than enough made up for it's absence in part 1 of the story. In part 2, the doctors straightened out my arm and I screamed. Like horror movie, amputating-my-arm screamed. It hurt. 

Long story short, since I'm sure I would be getting the harmonica right about now, they threw on a cast and luckily I didn't need screws or titanium or anything. It was a clean break. 

I was 9, so there isn't much of an epiphany story surrounding this. Except that danger is omnipresent. We were just a family, hanging out, going on a day trip, and a truck of a car hit us out of nowhere. It sucks, but it happens. What matters is how you handle the danger, what matters is whether or not you are surrounding yourself with people who can help you and take care of you, and that you would want to help and take care of too. Whether that is your group of friends or your family, danger is nothing if you have the support you need with you. The bodyguard to carry you through a flooded road, the mothers to give up their scarves for your arm, the family who would fight for you to stay safe. That's what matters.