It was a busy day for me. I was out and about, on my feet and in the car, settling paper work and fixing administrative matters for the business in between ferrying children to kindergarten, picking them up, getting them ready for their piano lesson, plus squeezing in a two-hour private tutoring class for someone who urgently needed my help.
By the time I returned home for good without scooting off again, it was 7.30pm. I was greeted with restless children, and I swear I wasn’t hallucinating when I say they were so restless to the point they were climbing walls.
They didn’t get their movement fix that day. It was school, home, tv, toys and one another. The littlest (since he didn’t go to school) seemed the most deprived. They all looked like they needed to move around more freely beyond the confines of our humble five-room flat. After their father emerged from the study (he too was holed up in the room finishing up work), I told him that the kids needed to run, climb, jump and release the monkey trapped in their human bodies, and that he needed to bring them to the playground to do so.
The Kao kids and Fatherkao came home shortly after their playground play and I was instructed to prepare to go to the A&E immediately. Apparently, Spiderman happened, and Spiderman fell. And Spiderman, who would usually rebound quickly after a fall couldn’t grip anything with his right hand and had a trembling right arm. Spiderman was in pain, and we suspected he might have fractured his arm after falling from a climb.
If you know Nat, you would also have met Spiderman.
So four x-rays and two consultations with a junior A&E doctor later, we were told that he might have just sprained his arm and suffered a hairline fracture.
Sounds good, I thought. This boy would recover in no time.
Our night at the A&E ended up with Nat returning home in a sling. He only cried once when the doctor examined his arm and pressed at the place of injury!
Then we made an appointment to see our orthopaedic specialist the day after (who also saw Fatherkao through his multiple-fractured right leg in 2010) and he totally frightened me after examining Nat when he said he had sustained a crack on his right humerus (complete with swelling) and that he needed a cast for two weeks, and I was all ready to bawl my eyeballs out and ban anything Spiderman would be planning to do from now on in the house.
The orthopaedic specialist was impressed by how he endured what he thought would be great pain for a two-year-old. This boy was such a trooper. He didn’t even wince once and held his arm so still when it was being wrapped!
But this boy, apparently, has made other career plans.
With his cast (which is so, so, so hard by the way), he’s declared himself Ninja Turtle…
Ninja Turtles have hard shells, he says. And his cast is his hard shell.
And Iron Man…
The cast is part of the Iron Man armour, and so it looks
And hasn’t stopped for a minute to wince and moan or cry and complain about any pain or discomfort.
It’s business as usual, and nothing’s gonna stop all that climbing, jumping and bouncing. I guess what’s assuring now is that with his “armour” and “shell” on him now, I would never have to worry that he would end up breaking a bone if he fell again (on the same arm). In fact, we all have to careful of him now – because his cast can be used as a weapon which could injure all of us instead!
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