One spring evening when I was eleven, I was playing soccer in the street with some neighbor friends and one of the dads on the street. It was fun since soccer was quite a new game to us then. That night my right knee started to hurt and I rubbed it in pain as I tossed and turned in my bed. The next day, I could barely walk. I was able to get to school, but with a very noticeable limp.
Mom took me to the doctor. He didn’t know what it was. Maybe it is just a sprain, he said. Come back to see me next week if it doesn’t go away. We were back in two days, because it got worse.
For the next few days I saw the doctor a lot. The he didn’t know what to make of me. He did all sorts of tests. He even took three vials of blood out of me! When the nurse saw me, she exclaimed, “Well, if it isn’t the galloping gomboo.”
The doctor gave me a brace to put on my leg. It had long metal
strips sewn inside a fabric casing that wrapped all the way around my leg. It had a little space for my knee cap to peek out. It went from mid-thigh to mid-calf. The whole thing was held together with velcro. I had to use crutches.
When I was in second grade, one of my friends had a cast and had to use crutches because he had a sprained ankle. I was jealous of all the attention he got. I wanted crutches too. At recess we all took turns using his crutches while he sat on the grass. I wanted a cast and crutches so bad, that I tried to deliberately break my ankle with a sledge hammer. Luckily, I lost my nerve at the last second!
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