The Arm It was May of 1945. I was 11, and the end of the war was in sight. Hitler had done the right thing and shot himself and without their "military genius", Germany had been defeated. The Japs were barely holding on by the skin of their teeth. The summer was starting for me and had been pretty good so far. It wouldn't be my best summer by far. My best summer was 5 years away. But I guess there is only one great summer per customer. My father was overseas in the Pacific. He was a career army officer who had joined well before the war had started. My mother and I and my brother lived in an apartment house owned by my grandfather and his second wife. My grandmother had passed away four years ago and my grandfather had remarried. We lived in Lakewood, New Jersey and we had gotten there by way of Carthage Missouri. The town lived up to it's name. There were a lot of woods and one large lake named Carasaljo. Supposedly it was named after three children who had drowned in it. Their names were Carol, Sally and Joseph. Whether this was true or not I have no idea but it sounded right. The lake was the hangout for most of the kids in town. In the winter when it froze over we ice skated on it. Sometimes we played hockey with hockey sticks made from tree limbs. Much of the time we would skate or walk to the north end, which was about two miles. Then with a piece of bedsheet, or other material, tied between two pieces of tree limb or old broomsticks we would hold up the sail with both hands and let the wind blow us down to the other end. I didn't have any skates, and we didn't have enough money to buy any, so I had to borrow a pair from Shorty Buckalew. Shorty and his brother Sonny were part of the bunch of kids I hung around with. Their mother owned the Esso station about a block from my grandfathers apartment house on Main St. These were hockey skates and I had them sharpened every week. A guy with a shop of some kind would sharpen them for me for free. My ankles were weak so I had to use ankle straps to keep them straight. Skating wasn't the only fun we had on the lake in the winter. People would come down from New York and sit on the benches along the boardwalk. The men wore heavy overcoats and high hats. We would get behind them at a safe distance and try to knock off their hats with snowballs. Any hit would produce a scramble for the woods where they couldn't catch us. Then after a safe period of time we were back to throwing again. Of course summer was great too. There was a small sandy beach and roped off swimming. In the middle of the lake was a float. The float was made of a wooden platform sitting on several sealed 50 gallon drums. In order to qualify to swim out to the float you had to demonstrate to the life guard that you could swim all the way without drowning. The lifeguard was always out on the lake in his rowboat and he would make you swim a certain distance inside the roped area before he let you go out to the float. I qualified but just barely. The float was fun. You could lay on it in the sun or dive off it or go under it among the drums. There was a pier with a store/casino that stuck out on the lake. If you had any money you could have a good time in there. I never had much money so I stayed out of the place. Most of the time anyway. My Dad's check didn't always arrive on time and my grandfather charged us the $45.00/mth full rent on the apartment. No break there. There was a gazebo for those who wanted to get out of the sun or rain or snow in the winter. It was about 20ft square. All around the inside was a continuous bench. The roof was peaked and held up by 4 X 4s so there were no walls. The ceiling was the peaked roof and there were 4, 2 X 8 beams criss crossing the structure below the peaked roof. I was in the habit of standing on the bench and jumping and grabbing a beam and swinging on it then letting go and landing on my feet. Up till this day I always jumped for the closest beam and only eyed the farther beam since I thought maybe I could reach it, then again maybe I couldn't. The farther beam was at a 90 degree angle from the one I usually swung on. I guess I was feeling extra brave this day because I got up on the bench facing the distant beam and felt pretty good about making the jump safely. If I didn't make it I probably would do a belly flop on the concrete floor and that would hurt in the morning. So I jumped. My body was stretched out pretty far. Almost parallel to the ground. My fingers found the edge of the beam and I held on. My body had such momentum that I swung under the beam, around to the other side with my knees well above it. The force was to great and I let go of the beam. Down I went holding out my right arm to try to break the fall. I broke my fall alright along with my right arm. At first I didn't feel anything. Then when I looked I saw my arm just below the wrist. What a mess. It was shaped like an S, there was a little blood and part of my arm bone was sticking out. My first thought was to start screaming. So I did. "I broke my arm, I broke my arm". I did this at the top of my lungs. People started to gather around me. The lifeguard. who was in his boat on the other side of the lake, set a new world speed record getting there. Somebody tried to reassure me that my arm wasn't broken, just fractured. I failed to see the distinction or take any comfort from that statement. I finally stopped yelling and the life guard and others sat me up and tried to make me as comfortable as possible. I was asked my name but I refused to give it. I refused because I felt that my Mother had enough troubles with taking care of me and my brother by herself with very little money. So I wasn't going to cause her anymore trouble by telling her I had broken my arm. My 11 year old mind didn't think about what I was supposed to do now. Would she worry less if I didn't come home that night? Since I wouldn't tell anyone my name or where I lived somebody decided to call the police. Two cops arrived and I was taken to a patrol car and put in the back seat. They also wanted to know who I was but I wasn't going to talk to them either. They told me that they were taking me to a Doctor they knew who could fix my arm. We arrived at the Doctors office and he looked at my arm. He sat me up on his operating table and said he was going to have to set it. That was fine with me as long as I didn't have to tell him who I was. Then my mother arrived and when I saw her the first thing I said was "Don't cry mom, don't cry". She didn't cry she just seemed glad to see me. Someone at the lake who knew me and had seen what happened had called my mother. She called the police and that's how she found out where I was. The Doctor told my mother he was going to set my arm. My worst summer was about to begin. The doctor told me to lay down on the table. He then said he was going to put a mask on my face and spray ether on it to put me to sleep. I was really unhappy with that. Just last year I had my tonsils removed and was put to sleep with gas. I didn't like that at all. I thought about my experience last year lying on the operating table with another mask on my face. The doctor told me to take deep breaths and start counting from 100 backwards. So I started counting, 99, 98, at this point I couldn't feel anything below my waist. I told them but I was ignored. 97, 96, 95 now I couldn't feel anything above my waist. I reported that fact and got the some kind of response which echoed and echoed in my mind over and over as I fell into a bottomless pit. Round and round, sometimes I could look down and see myself falling. ....65 and I was finally asleep. Apparently not much about my tonsil removal was very successful. I had been home for several days in bed when I started to feel sick to my stomach. My mother was downstairs in my grandfathers apartment. My signal to her to get home was to bang on the radiator with a hammer. I was feeling pretty bad so I banged the heck out of that radiator. Just as she got back I started to throw up. It was all blood. I thought I was dying there was so much blood. I had been swallowing blood for three or four days and it finally came up. It scared me pretty good. I did heal but decided then and there never to have my tonsils taken out again. So that was what was going through my mind as I lay there waiting to be put to sleep again. The doctor sprayed the ether and I asked that nobody say a word so I wouldn't hear whatever was said over and over again as I fell into the bottomless pit. All was quiet. When I awoke I had a cast on my arm from wrist to shoulder. I also threw up. Gas would always make me sick. Nothing to do now except go home and come back in three weeks to see how my arm was doing. I can't say I had any exciting things happened to me during this waiting period. I had to get back to the doctor for that. About three weeks later we were back in the doctors office. X-rays be taken and the cast removed. The doctor sat down next to me and brought out this electric saw with a round 2 inch cutting blade on the end. When he turned it on it sounded like a dentists drill with a high whine. As he approached the cast I told him to hold it. He was going to slice up my arm with that thing. No, he said and rubbed it on my skin. I was still dubious so I said that I wanted to cut the cast myself. He let me have the saw and showed me where to cut. I sliced it from wrist to shoulder and then he pried it apart and removed it. He then told my mother and me that the arm had not knit correctly and he would have to break it again and reset it So I went through the same thing once more. The bottomless pit, the throwing up and a new cast. I was beginning to not like this at all. Now my arm had been broken twice and I was starting to get scared and stubborn. Another three weeks went by and we returned to the doctor for the second checkup. The X-rays showed that the arm was still not set properly or the bones had moved during my stay at home. Whichever it was I removed my cast and was put to sleep again. This time I was not totally asleep and felt the pain of my arm being broken and reset. Not only that but I got some ether in my right eye which would burn for the next three weeks. That was the third break. I spent another three weeks at home doing whatever I could to keep me busy and thinking about my next doctors visit. Sure enough the bones were not setting right. But this time I had hit the wall and was not going to go through all that again. Neither was my mother. My mother had a bad temper and she really let that quack have it. We were through with that guy, but now where would we go? Somehow even with the war going on and the wounded crowding the Army hospital my mother got me admitted to the hospital at Fort Monmouth. They found room for me alright, in the maternity ward. I didn't get a bed, just a gurney in the middle of the floor. I dreaded what was coming and it wasn't long in getting there. They came to get me and I fought like a tiger. I yelled and tried to hit them with my cast. I grabbed water and heating pipes with my left hand or anything else I could grasp. They finally got me to the operating room where I tried to calmly explain that I had to go to the bathroom and couldn't do this right now. I got to the bathroom once but they weren't fooling with me anymore. I was given a shot in the arm and went out like a light. I was told later that even with the shot I was still fighting so they had to give me gas anyway. I don't know what I expected upon awakening but it was probably another cast and then go home. But not this time. I awoke to an arm sitting vertically with my elbow hanging over the edge of the bed. I was in some kind of contraption that turned out to be traction. There was a bag of weights pulling the upper part of my arm one way and another bag of weights pulling my arm that other way. Each bag of weights was tied by some kind of thick string to a pin at my wrist and a pin at my elbow. Two things were familiar. My mother was there waiting for me to awaken and I threw up. The thing that concerned me most were the pins that looked like they went through my arm. There was a gause wrap around the pin and my arm so I couldn't see how they were kept in place. I asked my mother if the pins went through my arm. She said no that they went around the outside and were held in place by the gause wrapping. That tale lasted only a few minutes when in came a couple of nurses with an X-ray machine. For some reason they had to undo the gause to take the X-ray. Naturally I looked right away to see if the pins were bent around my arm. Of course they weren't. They had drilled through the bones at my wrist and at my elbow and driven the pins through. I was somewhat upset about that but accepted it with a minimum of terror. I was on a roll away bed since the contraption they had me tied to couldn't be moved to another bed. As soon as the X-rays were done with I was moved from that room to my permanent room. This room was small and rather dark with no outside windows. I guess I was lucky to have a room at all. There was a bathroom but I wasn't going to be able to use it. I wouldn't be able to get out of that bed for quite awhile. It was bedpan time every day. The procedure that would be followed was this: Everyday there would be an X-ray of the break and then some lead weight added to the bags to pull my bones into the correct position. When the time was right the weights would be slowly removed until the bones fit back together like two pieces of a puzzle. Then the healing or knitting process could start. I would be in that bed for the next 30 days without touching the floor. Except once when I slid over to the side of the bed and reached down and touched the floor with my right foot. I could have torn the whole thing apart and broken my arm again had I slid completely off the bed. But then I was always doing stupid things like that. There were quite a few people running around cleaning, mopping changing sheets and doing a lot of other menial chores. I noticed that they all wore the same type of uniform. The most noticeable was the dungaree jacket with the initials P.O.W. on the back. I asked the nurse what that meant and she told me that they were all German prisoners of war. They were extremely polite and nice to me. I suppose they would soon be going home since the war in Europe was now over. Maybe they knew what was waiting for them and didn't want to go back. There were a lot of rooms on that floor. Most of them filled with wounded soldiers. My next door neighbor came for a visit. He was maybe 18 or 19. Turns out that he tried to open a can of C rations with his bayonet and cut off his right thumb. I don't remember his name but during his stay in the hospital he and I played a lot of cards. One handed of course. I had two nurses that I remember. One was pretty and the other wasn't. The pretty one was named Sunny and I thought she was pretty only from the front. I didn't think much of her from the side but my friend disagreed and said she was pretty from all angles. From my present perspective I would have to agree with him. My mother would visit almost every day bringing me comic books and candy. Rationing was still in effect so she couldn't always get gas for the car. I loved to read comic books and I had many of them, usually lying all over my bed and the floor. Since I couldn't get out of bed to pick them up one of the P.O.W.s would have to do it for me. It was during this time in the hospital that my mother brought me some legal papers changing my name from Carlomagno to my stepfathers name Bolvin. I signed them, left handed, not knowing really what that meant. I had never met my biological father and wouldn't for another 30 years. The procedure went along without incident. They put weights in and then started to take them out. All this time I had to sleep on my back. I don't think I have ever slept on my back since those thirty days in the hospital. Meanwhile the war was going on. We dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6th and I didn't hear anything about it. And then another bomb on Nagasaki on August 9th and I didn't hear anything about that one either. Today would be a banner day for me and for the rest of the world. I was finished with my treatment and apparently the bones had been put back together. The apparatus I was tied to was taken down and I was put into a wheel chair. I couldn't walk because I was much to weak in the legs from lack of use. The orderly took me to another room and I asked him what he was going to do. He told me he was going to pull the pins out of my arm. I was somewhat alarmed by this and was about to protest when he quickly snipped off one end of the pin through my wrist with a pair of metal cutters and pulled the pin out with a pair of pliers. I didn't feel a thing and before I could tell him to hold it a minute he did the same thing to the pin in my elbow. It was all over before I could get properly scared. I was taken out to the porch for the first fresh air I had breathed in a month. I sat on the screened porch with several soldiers listening to the radio and talking when the program was interrupted with the announcement that Japan had surrendered. It was VJ day August 15th 1945. The celebration started immediately. Trucks and jeeps and fire engines went racing up and down the street. Sirens were blaring, bells were ringing and everybody was screaming. An Army post is a great place to be when a war ends. All was well with my arm and the world. My arm would always be well. The same, I'm sorry to say, can't be said about the world. I went home a few days later, barely able to walk but getting stronger all the time. My therapy was to swim as much as I could to strengthen the bones. There weren't any public swimming pools in Lakewood but not far was the estate of the late John D.Rockefeller. He had left this huge acreage to the state as a park. It was completely surrounded by a wrought iron fence 8 feet tall. In the park there were deer and rabbits and several other types of animals running free. Best of all there were several man made lakes to swim in. As you came into the park, through the main gate, the lakes were on your left. On your right sitting on a hill was Rockefellers immense mansion. My mother took me out there several times a week to swim. gradually I became stronger and I didn't worry about my arm much. One other thing I did was to throw stones, mostly at telephone poles. I think I threw every stone in New Jersey at least once. I liked throwing and eventually developed a very strong throwing arm. At 14 years of age I was able to throw a football 60 yards in the air. But that's a whole other story. ������ ������
Copyright © 2001 Robert W Carlomagno |