By Rick Kaempfer
My wife Bridget was heading out of town for the weekend.
”Are you sure you’ll be OK?” she teased, as I dropped her off at the airport. She had a twinkle in her eye when she asked because she was taking our three-year-old hellion along with her, which meant that I was only going to be responsible for the two older (largely self-sufficient) boys.
“What could go wrong?” I asked.
As I drove home I was planning the weekend in my mind. I figured we might go to a movie, play some baseball in the backyard, or maybe go for a bike ride or two. All of those plans went out the window moments after I returned home. A phone call from summer school delivered the news.
“Mr. Kaempfer?”
I knew that voice. It was the school nurse.
“You better get over here right away. Tommy broke his arm.”
I noticed she didn't say that he "hurt his arm," or "sprained his arm," or "bruised his arm." She said he broke it. I wasn’t used to such confident diagnoses from her. It had to be bad. When I arrived at the school and saw the arm hanging at a right angle, I concurred with the diagnosis. Tommy was in excruciating pain.
“How did he do it?” I asked.
“He tripped over his shoelaces and tried to break his fall with his arm,” she said.
Yup, that’s my son. We Kaempfers are a graceful bunch.
When we got to the emergency room, the triage nurse diagnosed the broken arm right away too. “Are you his Dad?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Where’s his mom?”
“She’s on a plane right now.”
“Do you know his medical history?” she asked.
I nodded. I’m his father, not his cab driver.
“Good,” she said. “This is a pretty bad break. He may need surgery.”
She handed me a stack of forms to fill out, but my first concern was keeping Tommy calm. When he heard the word “surgery” his screams became ear-splitting.
”Does he know what surgery is?” she asked.
I pointed at the screaming boy; exhibit A.
“We’ll get him some morphine to help with the pain,” she said.
Tommy yelped even louder. He knew what that was too. I have to say, that’s about the time I started getting a little worried myself. I never envisioned a situation where I would be discussing surgery and morphine for my ten year old son.
After we got Tommy into a bed, and they finally inserted the morphine drip, the doctor pulled me into the hallway to discuss what was going to happen next. I was thankful that Tommy couldn’t hear us.
“We’re going to have to put him under for the surgery,” he said. “We may need to re-break his arm. It’s very difficult to put back into place when it’s jagged like that.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We do this all the time. Besides, you’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“I do?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “The nurse told me that his mother is in an airplane. Is that true?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“So she left you in charge of watching him?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“And he broke his arm before her flight even landed?”
Ooh. That did sound bad.
“We’ll take care of him,” the doctor said, pointing toward morphine-boy. Then he pointed up toward the sky. “You take care of her.”
You’ll be happy to hear that this story has a happy ending. The surgery was successful. Tommy has a cast on his arm, but he has adapted to it quite well. As for his mother, when I finally got in touch with her later that night, I found out that her flight had been delayed by two hours. That meant that Tommy actually broke his arm before she even took off.
I’m thinking of contacting the Guinness World Record Book. I don’t know what the category would be, but I’m pretty confident that we set some sort of a record.
To her credit, Bridget wasn’t mad at me. Although, when the shock of the situation wore off, she did parrot my parting words back to me.
“What could go wrong?”
If you'd like to read any other Suburban Man columns (there are 27 of them now), click here: http://suburbanmanarchive.blogspot.com
