Basketball and Baseball Were Not Enough (Cont.)
Screen 3 of 3The severe pain in my shoulder, along with the shock of Dr. Stone's last comment, must have been more than I could stand. And I lapsed again into unconsciousness.
The next things I remember were a narrow hospital bed, a low light in the corner of the room, and my mother sitting close by reading. But most vivid of all, I remember the cutting pain just below my right elbow. It felt like a sharp knife sticking into the flesh at that point. I raised my head just enough to see something new, a shiny metal brace attached to my right shoulder and extending all along the right arm, one of its sharp edges pressing in on the big muscle just below the elbow. Oh, how that hurt, and I said so, but got no answer.
Somebody tried to feed me, but I could eat very little. When I complained again about the awful pain, the nurse gave me some pills, which made me doze off to sleep.
Early the next morning, Dr. Stone was at my bedside examining the brace. "Yes, nurse, it may be too tight," he observed. "Release the pressure some but not much. If we make it too loose, those multiple fractures will not heal."
When he saw I was awake and listening, he told me the fractures in the scapula would eventually heal, giving me normal use of the hand, arm and shoulder--except that I would probably never again be able to lift my arm above the level of my shoulder!
Doctors can, of course, be wrong, and as it turned out he was this case--but not altogether.
I wore that painful steel brace for almost six months. Its right-angle shape kept the lower part of my arm rigidly fixed in a horizontal position across the front of my body, and never once during that entire time was I free of the pain caused by the brace pushing down into the arm muscle below the elbow.
But I came out of the ordeal much better than the doctor had predicted. Even though I have not been able since that accident to raise my right arm to its full length upward, this inability to reach that high has not been too restricting. Late in the spring of 1928, I began again to swim, play tennis, and some few years later played basketball on an independent team. I still swim and play tennis frequently, but the only time I ever mention the difficulty with my shoulder in a tennis game is when I'm about to be beaten by a better player!
I am quick to admit, however, that I never tried to play football again. But I did coach the football team at South Hill High School in Virginia in the middle 1930's.
"Bone-crusher Billy" certainly deserved his nickname. He not only sent me to the hospital with his crushing tackle, but also put many other players on the injury list, some of them his own teammates, the others unfortunate members of opposing football teams.
Billy and I joked many times about the first--and last-- time he ever tackled me in football, and we remained good friends until he died at an early age in Texas, where he had been successful in the oil business.
I know that basketball and baseball were indeed enough for me in 1927, but at that time I may have been like the New Hampshire farmer who when accused of being greedy in his land grabbing, replied, "I'm not greedy; I just want all the land that touches mine!"
Chester C. Travelstead
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