My Favorite Arm

by Jenna Brotsky

Disclaimer: Two names have been changed to protect someone that I don’t especially want to protect, but whom I’d rather protect than have sue me.

Delia, Nicole and I trooped out to our usual spot and formed a little circle on the cold cement that made a fake sidewalk all through the school. Above us was a concrete awning, probably as cold as the sidewalk, supported by poles painted teal with school spirit. In our little circle there on the sidewalk we’d all laid out the paper bag lunches the school gave us every Wednesday. This week it was chicken nuggets.

It was also the day before Halloween, which is why the little sticker on the bags said “Spider Nuggets.” I think the people who made the lunches thought they were being spooky, but they weren’t. Most of the fifth graders who’d received the bags thought “Spider Nuggets” was one of the lamest adult attempts to be hip to our happenings they’d ever seen.

Then there was me. I didn’t find the stickers spooky, I found them terrifying and more than a little gross. Spiders are and have always been one of my biggest fears. But I swallowed hard and made up my mind to ignore it, enjoy my lunch, and move on.

Of course, I was sitting with Nicole, so I didn’t get away with that. Nicole and I were as far from friends as is humanly possible, but both of us were very close to Delia, so when lunchtime rolled around each school day I would suck it up and play nice with her. In return, Nicole would do everything in her power to hurt my feelings, drive wedges between Delia and me, and generally make my life miserable. It took me two more years of this kind of treatment to learn how to fight back. So for the moment, I just sat there and took it when Nicole smirked at me and said, “Oh, look, Jenna. Spider Nuggets.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. I ate quickly, talking only to Delia in between bites, and crumpled the bag up to toss it away. “I’m going to the pods,” I announced after I finished.

The pods were a feature of our playground that I’m sure some other school somewhere has, but I’ve yet to meet a graduate from that other school. The pods were basically a special form of monkey bars; they were swollen puffs of yellow plastic with handles on the bottom and slits through the center so that they could move back and forth on curvy metal tracks. In the fifth grade, they were new and exciting, a challenge calling us all, begging to mar the soft skin of our hands with blisters and then calluses. It was only the end of October, but I’d already clocked so many hours on them that my palms were rougher than those of a construction worker. I was now working on tricks, like jumping onto a pod that was a foot away, and using momentum to push forwards, rather than arm strength. That day I was determined to ace that particular trick once and for all. There was just one minor problem: it had rained the night before.

Fingers tingling and heart racing, I stood on the terribly fake wooden platform and tapped at one rain-slick pod, sending it out a little further than my arm’s reach. Perfect. I bent my knees, got loose, and leaped. My left hand grabbed the pod’s handle, but I could already feel my grip slipping, so I swung out the right hand to snag the next one—

And fell. Fast. Hard.

It’s funny, because I’ve felt the sensation of that fall in my dreams so many times, but I have absolutely no memory of falling in real life. I just remember the blue of the sky above the pods being traded in for the slightly glittery black of the artificial rubber beneath them. And it’s funny, because just touching the scar is enough to make me twitch in pain, but I don’t remember it hurting when I landed. I just remember some sensation so powerful I had to stare at its source, and seeing a flash of bleach white bone retreating into the flesh of my right arm again. One thick red drop started to ooze out of the cut. And I screamed. And I screamed. And I screamed.

“I’ve killed myself! I’ve killed myself!” Everyone on the playground turned to find the source of my shrieks. Kids must have surged forward to see what was happening, because the next thing I knew I was staring up at a ring of jeans and sneakers. My eyes kept darting back and forth from my arm— which I saw just as skin and blood and that terrible, terrible hole— to the shoes of the middle schoolers crowded around me. “I’ve killed myself!” I repeated until I was hoarse. “It was my favorite arm!” And it was— I was right handed and it was my right arm that was lying before me, maimed and hideous. I had never before appreciated just how useful my arm was, and now the title of “favorite arm” seemed like an award I would have to bestow upon it posthumously.

I heard somebody say they should get my sister, Leanne, who was off on the “upper yard” with all the other eighth graders. Even that didn’t calm me down, though in those days I saw her as the mature, strong mold I hoped to grow into, the perfect person to rescue me from any situation. I lay there, shouting and convinced I was dying, until a teacher named Chris, who had been a paramedic or some other emergency-handler type person in a past career, pushed his way through the circle and ordered everybody back. “You haven’t killed yourself,” he said in a soft, reassuring voice. It only convinced me he was a liar.

“Yes, I have, I have! I’ve killed myself! My favorite arm!” I’m sure I was screaming at him; shame curls in my stomach thinking about it now, but right then I wasn’t even sure which way was up. I was dying and nothing else mattered.

“You broke your arm,” Chris explained, still soothing. That didn’t make any sense to me— my only experience with broken bones was what I had read in Harry Potter, and nobody’s bone had punctured their skin in the books. The lunch bell rang somewhere far away, with Chris still calming me down the best he could. He spotted a bandana lying under the gymnastic bars and had another teacher fetch it. He dropped it over my arm. Many years later, I’ve learned that he probably did this to stop infection, to shield the wound from the air. But all I knew was that suddenly my horrific ex-arm was gone, and in its place was a pretty blue bandana, dark and serious like the ocean. I no longer had to watch one fat, viscous drop of blood run down my skin, no longer had to see the unnatural angle. Deep breaths were coming much more easily.

Soon my mother came, looking amazingly calm for the situation. She sent my terrified sister to get my things, and came with me to the ambulance. I have only a few brief flashes of what it was like inside the ambulance, probably a side effect of the pain and the fear I was in. But let me say this: if you’ve never been lifted up onto a stretcher, it’s nowhere near as fun as you might imagine. They were being so careful about the arm that getting me situated took longer than I’d ever anticipated, and right when they lifted me up I was seized with a panic that my arm would fall off. It didn’t, of course, but I was dizzy and scared and couldn’t think.

When we arrived at the hospital, they wheeled us straight in. (About a week later, after I was home and safe, my mom told me that we’d gotten to by-pass the whole emergency room.) In the hospital, I stayed on the stretcher, and I could see the tops of my feet when I craned my head up. The nurse who came to give me painkillers was blonde with colorful scrubs. She stuck a needle in my good arm and started pumping in the morphine. At first it seemed okay, and then—

“It itches!” I screamed. “It itches it itches it itches!” My whole body was on fire, tingling and excruciating. When I chanced a look at my second-favorite arm, I saw skin bubbling as if it were the cauldron from Macbeth. Hives were popping up and disappearing again at light speed. “Help, help! My arm! The morphine’s exploding me!”

“No, no,” the nurse crooned. “Don’t worry. They’re just bug bites.”

I stared at her. She was either crazy or the biggest liar on the planet. “Stop the itching!” I screamed, right at her.

Realizing that I couldn’t be tricked into tranquility, the nurse decided to use honesty. “Shh, shh,” she soothed. “It’s okay, you’re just having a reaction to the morphine.”

Everything was blurry at this point— the mix of morphine, itching and pain was making my head swim and my thoughts swirl. All I can remember is my mom telling me there wasn’t time before the surgery to switch me off the morphine and onto a different sedative. Then I was being wheeled toward the operating room—

I was floating over a sea of, um, a sea of … sea. Blackness.

My eyes snapped open. The world was cool, but not unpleasantly so. I felt as though I were huddled under my blankets at home, pink woven strands pulled up to my chin and my toes wiggling in soft socks, with my thick comforter keeping me wrapped in tight. Above me were fluorescent lights like in the science lab at school.

“Jenna?” My mom and dad appeared at my side. Suddenly I realized that I had no clothes on under the thin hospital-grade sheet the doctors had covered me with.

“I’m naked,” I informed them, twisting my head to see them more clearly.

“It’s okay,” Mom answered, “It’s okay. I have your clothes right here. You’re going to be fine.”

I could only focus on one thing at a time. “I want my clothes.”

She reassured me again. “I have them right here. You can’t get dressed yet, but you’ll get a hospital gown soon.” I couldn’t quite let it go though. Mom brought out something from by her side to distract me. “Look, they gave you a little bear!”

Black, reflective eyes peered at me cautiously over the top of a teeny, tiny green doctor’s mask. Little ears the color of hot chocolate stuck up through what looked like a shower cap, but I knew it to be a surgical cap from movies that showed doctors at work. The stuffed bear was adorable. He was to keep me company for the next three days, lying in my hospital bed, and would be joined by many other toys as friends and family received the news and sent their wishes for a speedy recovery in the form of presents and cards.

It took 72 hours in the hospital before I was allowed home. It took an additional week before they exchanged my awkward splint for a real cast. It took a month before I traded in the cast for sweatbands to wear over the thick, crimson scars to keep them from getting sunburned and a plastic brace to keep the bone from re-fracturing in the case of sharp impact. And it took two more months of sitting out during P.E. class, doing exercises to strengthen the muscles and get them used to the two solid metal plates permanently implanted in my arm, to get back my full range of motion and strength.

During those three months when I was back at school but out of any kind of game, I sat on the sidelines and watched gloomily as Nicole and Delia partnered up at any chance Coach Nick gave them. The thing was, Nicole and I had made a deal with Delia as witness: for however long it took me to recover completely, the two of them would be gym partners. And when I could participate again, Delia and I would get to partner up for the same length of time. But looking forward to the future didn’t mean I was enjoying the present. For twelve very slow weeks I paced at the edges of the gym, or the field, or wherever we were playing while my best friend and my worst enemy skipped around together.

Then at long, long last the day arrived: I came into school with a smile on my face and a note for Coach Nick. At the start of second period P.E., I proudly handed him the slip of yellow lined paper coated in my mother’s precise, old-style cursive. The coach played with the zipper on his customary America-colored warm up jacket as he read it. When he was done, he beamed at me and announced, “Okay, Jenna! Good to have you back. Go grab a ball and a partner. We’re practicing lay ups today.”

My grin was so wide I thought the top of my head was in danger of popping off as I ran up to Delia. “I can play today!” I shouted.

She laughed and hugged me, and we trotted over to get our ball. I think I missed every shot, but it didn’t matter. For three days we practiced basketball, and I didn’t improve one bit— and neither did Nicole’s temper.

On the fourth day she came over to us with a hideous pout on her face. “It’s not fair,” she griped. “Delia’s been your partner every day this week! It’s my turn!”

I opened my mouth to tell her that was the deal, but Delia cut in. “So? You were my partner every day for three months. You agreed that when Jenna was back again I would be her partner for three months.” Nicole tried to say something but she was interrupted. “It’s not fair to Jenna if it’s your turn again already,” Delia continued. “After three months we’ll all go back to taking turns being partners with other people.” She grabbed a basketball off the rack, and walked away with me. I glanced back over my shoulder to see Nicole’s usually mean mouth hanging open. I turned around and smiled so hard that the scars on my arm didn’t matter anymore.