A Case of a Broken Ankle

What else to do in the face of pain than laugh. A line I once heard from a movie that I took to heart. I admired the positive logic and how it could be applied to every situation. A truth of life is that there is never going to be a situation where a downside does not exist. Back when I broke my ankle, there was nothing but pain. Through that pain, I had to ease the situation. The most utilitarian way to do this was to make jokes and laugh about it. I found laughing so useful because it distracted me from the throbbing sensation of pain that would not let up. Through every single stage of the whole ordeal, it was my ability to laugh at the situation that gave it a silver lining that made things all right.
There I was on one hot afternoon jumping around on a trampoline and that is when I landed on my ankle the wrong way. There was a series of cracks and then a sharp pain that overtook my foot. All I could do was scream in pain. As I was laying there holding my leg my parents rushed over and slid off my sock. We were now looking upon a plump beat. My entire foot had swelled up immensely and turned purple. Without a second’s notice, my parents start laughing and the jokes start pouring out. All of them being about some Flintstone looking feet. I couldn’t help but laugh at each one. After a minute or two of laughing, I was able to prop myself up and hobble to the car where we proceeded to the emergency room.

While sitting there in the emergency room the pain was undeniably horrendous. Luckily for me, my mom was willing to keep a conversation with me. It was the talking and laughing that kept me distracted from the pain. We waited there four hours. That was four hours with just an ice pack on some throbbing pain. Every time I went silent my mind could not handle the overload of sensory information being transferred from my now broken ankle. It took all of my willpower to just let go and focus on other people. From there, it became clear just how many people were calmly sitting in the waiting room in the same exact boat as me. That is when it dawned on me that breaking my ankle was not the worse thing that could have happened to me. My mom and I began making jokes about how the next couple of months was going to go. The whole situation was now just like an ongoing bad joke, but it didn’t matter because I was looking at it from a more positive point of view and life seemed a little bit better for it.

The ongoing events included many x-rays, a cast, and some medication to ease the pain while my ankle slowly healed. I was off my game for a bit more than a month and the whole time I was pampered. I wasn’t allowed to walk on it and crutches made it ridiculously difficult to do some of the most basic tasks such as getting around the house to do chores and make dinner. The result was my sister had to help me out way more than she wanted. To this day she still brings it up and talks about how I owe her for, in her words, being my servant. Although it wasn’t the greatest time, we can all look back at the whole situation and laugh at it which makes it seem like a minor happenstance in the greater scheme of life. It was the ability to laugh that helped me get through the whole ordeal. The only thing that laughing didn’t help with was the tedious medical bills.

Photo by tedeytan on Foter.com / CC BY-SA