Tim’s first sports injury

When the snow starts falling, Tim loves to get out there with his sled and snowboard. On Friday, as it was still snowing heavily he started lobbying to be taken to the gorge (below the Croton Dam, several miles away) to go sledding.

Since the roads were terrible, we said no, but Brigid did agree to walk over to the local high school a half mile away, with Tim and a couple of neighborhood friends. But first, they did a little easy snowboarding on the little slope that is our small front yard. All 14 or so feet.

So Tim goes bounding down this little hill, takes his foot off the snowboard and jams it into the ground. He let’s out a shriek and starts hopping around. Brigid takes him into the house and he starts carrying on about his ankle. He didn’t roll his ankle, just jammed his foot down hard. And he’s got no swelling or discoloration of his ankle. But he was in pain – started yelling whenever you touched his leg. And couldn’t put any weight on it at all.

So we gave him tylenol, put on ice and Saturday took him to Phelps for an x-ray.

And – it showed a broken fibula – down at his ankle – just above the foot.

He’s got an aircast, crutches, and some vicodin (which is being used very sparingly!). We got back our ice machine (for icing down injuries – an ingenious device consisting of tubes, an ice chest and a small motor) from our friend Damian Gagnon to ice it down.

Tomorrow we will see an orthopedist and Tim will end up with a cast for probably five or six weeks. It is a non-displaced fracture, so we expect it to heal up without any problems. It does knock him out of his new sport, roller hockey, which he was about to start, and may slow Tim down for the beginning of the baseball season. He also missed his last basketball game yesterday.

Tim was feeling quite sorry for himself for about the last day and a half (“Why’d this happen to me?”) but now is doing fine. Friday night Brigid slept in Tim’s room with him, before we knew the ankle was broken. Then last night we re-arranged things – Tim slept in our bed with me while Brigid moved into his bed. Meanwhile Joe craftily stayed up watching TV until 2AM and then feel asleep for the night on the couch.

This morning while we were lying in bed Tim was chatting away – I was trying to sleep – and he said “This is a bummer, but I have my family” and then he took my hand. The sort of thing you like to hear.

With all the sports Tim does, it’s kind of crazy that he got hurt on a tiny slope in our front yard! I think it’s possible that he simply landed funny – and he is a BIG boy, so that probably put extra strain on the joint and the bone cracked. I told him that as long as you play sports, injuries are part of it.

Here he is:

And the offending foot!