How I Broke My Right Arm... part 2 of 3...

This is the 2nd part on how I broke my right arm... I had previously posted on the 1st part. A note of thanks to you guys out there who has read the 1st part and commented and those who are actually eager to read on about it... Yes, I am so good at making fun of myself so that I can entertain and cheer you guys up! :P

Oh well... come on up folks... come and join me in my journey to reminisce my hilarious broken arm stories... we go back to 1992 again...

About 3 weeks after I broke my right arm, I have been wearing the cast for weeks and the inner fold of my elbow (you know the part where the docs/nurses always jab at to withdraw your blood or check for blood pressure) - so anyway, that part is starting to itch like mad!

Again, the picture shown here is not me... we don't have the luxury to capture that incident so long ago! The picture shown here is how my hand would looked like when it was in full cast. Mine was longer, until armpit actually and the plaster cast they use is VERY hard - like cement!

You see, my cast was all the way from my palm... to my armpit. I know I broke the 2 main bones on my right hand but to plaster it up all the way from palm to armpit is just too much!

And yeah, thanks to that, the inner fold of my elbow itches like crazy! And there's no way I could squeeze in my finger to scratch it! So you know what a NOT SO genius 12 year old girl do to relieve the itchiness? She used this:
Yeap... good ol' joss sticks... (Stop laughing you guys!) Long ago, my family were Buddhist and it is common for us to burn joss sticks everyday. So after the joss sticks burned out, I'd take it and use the other end (no ash) and poke it into the inner fold of my elbow and I'd go 'ahhhhhhhhhhhh' and poke, scratch, and poke, scratch, and poke, scratch...

Anyway, as I mentioned in my 1st part of the stories, my eldest uncle was a Chinese sin-seh (which means traditional doctor) and he has repeatedly told my parents that I should go for Chinese treatment (by him of course!) as the doctors in the hospital just simply yanked back my hand straight without massaging and putting back the bones properly. He offered to break my right hand again and fixed it up real nice for me. Yeah, right.... dream on!

So anyway, I was due to be at the hospital for them to remove the cast when I read the news that the hospital had a fire and the X-ray department lost quite a number of their patients records. Fearing the worse, we decided not to go to hospital to remove the cast as we thought my records would've been burned as well and what if they removed the cast wrongly and caused further damage? I mean, without the X-ray records how would they know right?

So, yeap... the not so genius 12 year old girl coupled with her naive parents then went to her eldest uncle's house and gave him the honor to remove the cast. Using this:
Uh-huh... you saw it right... A red plier. Removing the full arm cast using this... and only this... Seems like a scene from MacGyver now that I think of it! :P So what happened next?
I mean, what would my uncle do? Firstly, he starts by cutting the cast from my upper hand (you know the part you will touch with your thumb when you shake someone's hand). The first snip, and I went 'OUCHHHHHHHHH!' Blood started pouring out. I panicked. MacGyver Uncle panicked too. It seems that his first snip is too deep and he ended up cutting into my hand as well. I still have the V-shaped scar on my hand by the way... So, in that few moment, a sprinkle of some white powder to stop the blood, then after a while, the snipping continue, this time from another angle. Snip, snip, cut, cut and my cast was off finally!

This is the closest picture I can find from Google image search on how my hand looked like after the cast was taken off. My arm clearly was not straight, all thanks to the doctors who just yanked my squid-y arm up and immediately wrapped it up in cast.

Worse thing was the inner fold of my elbow... gosh... thanks to weeks of my active joss stick scratching moves, all the dead skins accumulated there and my uncle said that had I not removed the cast earlier, there will be maggots and worms coming out from that area since there's no ventilation and the dead skins are all over that area. Gross I know...

So, again, my uncle offered to break my arm again so that he can put back the bones in its place and straighten up my arm. But we declined and in the end, my uncle wrote a list of Chinese herbs that my mum has to buy and boil for few hours and make me drink every day for at least a month. I remembered seeing dead insects (cockroach looking) and dried flower petals in part of the herbs.

My uncle also came up with this cloth bandage contraption that I have to wear and wrap around my arm. It has 4 wooden sticks (looks like ice cream sticks but wider and thicker) to place on the sides of my arm - sort of like keeping the bones straight. I did told you my uncle was like MacGyver right? So I wore that contraption everyday while still drinking the Chinese herbs to heal the bones.

I was still absent from school and was planning to return to school when one night (about a week before I planned to go back to school), while climbing onto my double decker bed (I slept on the top deck while my elder brother slept on the bottom deck), I cleverly used my right arm and pressed onto one of the bed post. I put my whole body weight into that arm to press on the bed post so that I can climb up and the next thing I know, I heard a crackkkk sound... and I looked at my right arm.

To my horror, I'm seeing the squid-y arm again! Yeap... this is the part where I broke my right arm for the 2nd time! This time, I did feel the pain and feeling obviously scared, I started screaming for my mum to come to my bedroom immediately!

I remembered my mum saying "Why are you overreacting over the sight of cockroach?!" (Well, to be fair, I always screamed like that when I see bugs! So my mum's 1st reaction when she heard my scream was that I probably came into contact with some bugs...) and when she stood right in front of my bedroom door, and saw my broken arm AGAIN, she freaked out.

She gently helped me down again and I can hear her mumbling "Oh God not again, please no" and then she took a deep breath, and did what any panicked mother would do...

She pulled my hand straight.

We both heard the crackkkk sound again and while she still holds my hand, we looked down at my hand and this time, we saw that it was straight again! No more squid-y looking hand! Yipeeeee!! My mum has fixed my broken arm!!!
** To be continued in part 3 - coming up sometime next week as I need to rush out some product reviews & giveaways! Please be patient and stay tuned! Meanwhile, you can try to guess how I broke my arm the 3rd time... :D

(*Images taken from Google image search)