A Bad Injury, A Gross Bump and A Good Idea
Me with a Bryan Christie illustration
(hear Bryan discuss his 3-D work on a live video webcast this Thursday, Oct. 25, 4:30 p.m. at www.wmsu.org)
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TWO summers ago, as I sat on a green plastic chair in a bowling alley willing myself not to puke onto the pink Formica table that supported me, my two teenage sons and a small group of gawkers hovered around me. After witnessing the accident and then realizing that I would live, my boys’ initial concern had given way to boredom as we waited for the ambulance.
Dad’s making jokes - all is well. Where’s my PS2?
The pink faces of the strangers watching me were twisted with bad-actor concern that masked the amusement I knew they were feeling inside, all except for the wiry bowling alley manager. He had yelled at me earlier for interrupting him with my ‘problem’ while he was showing some kids how to bowl and his now-pained expression betrayed his internal guilt after realizing that I had been hurt and was seeking his help. Good! The kids had abandoned their lesson and were now observing me with knotted brows, scanning my face for the slightest sign that I was about to pass out from the pain slicing through my shoulder. It would make for some great story telling around the dinner table later on.
If I were to faint, though, it would not be from pain but from the immense feeling of imbecility that was swooning through my head.
This could not have happened at a worse time. The boys and I were in the middle of a no-moms-allowed trip from Connecticut to Maine in our new Toyota. They were too young to drive the car and we were now stuck somewhere in the middle of who-knows-where New Hampshire.
I’d been doing handstands successfully all of my life …
This time though, something went terribly wrong. (Karl! Why in hell were you doing handstands in a bowling alley? Well, why not?) To do a good handstand, you have to throw your upper body down onto a firm surface with tremendous force while simultaneously whipping your legs up to where your head should be. Your arms are relied upon to absorb all of this energy.
This time, though, my left arm buckled like a wet noodle, like it wasn’t even there. (So much for three years of not missing a gym date.) My left shoulder hit the crazy-patterned bowling alley carpet with magnum force and, instead of my body bouncing off to one side, it kept going downward beyond what was sensible, crushing into the carpet as its underlying bone structure caved and snapped inside me. My collarbone sheared off and the powerful ligaments holding it in place were severed.
I had popped the collarbone so severely that it created a visible bump an inch high that jutted out of the top of my shoulder.
- ERIK (age 12, sitting next to me, calls his mother at home): ‘Hi mom, it’s Erik - Yeah, everything’s fine. We’re just waiting for the ambulance to come pick up dad.’
- MOM: ‘WHAT???’
As it turns out, there’s nothing much any doctor can really do for this type of injury, certainly not in an emergency room. On the drive over (I drove myself there once the ambulance drivers told me it would cost $850 to drive four blocks!) I had imagined two burly nurses clutching my arm, planting their feet against my chest and then ripping my shoulder back the way it was when everything in life was normal. That was the way it always worked in the movies.
No such luck. The hospital said that when I got home to Connecticut a doctor could maybe screw the collarbone down, but that seldom really worked because the constant movement of the shoulder would soon snap off all the screw heads. In the end, they advised me to learn to live with a bump.
Incredulously, I left the emergency room just a little better off than when I entered it, with a shattered shoulder but a pocketfull of powerful painkillers (the non-drowsy type). And so, with one arm pinned to my chest and nestled in a blue sling, I maneuvered myself into the driver’s seat. Erik closed my door for me and Cole buckled my seatbelt before we took off for Maine. Why I continued on I still don’t know.
Well, why not?
Later, sitting at my home computer in Connecticut, I searched for graphics that would illuminate my injury but all that I could find were a lot of horrid, amateurish medical illustrations that grossed me out, mostly because of the bad artwork.
‘What would Bryan Christie do,’ I wondered? While I was the Graphics Director at Newsweek, Bryan had created some of the most beautiful 3-D medical drawings the magazine had ever published, certainly a whole lot better than anything I had ever done, and I had made a lot over the years, from showing how Reagan, Lennon and the Pope were shot to how the Jarvik 7 artificial heart was installed (with the disclaimer, ‘Kids - don’t try this at home!’).
Bryan had developed a unique and elegant technique for rendering images of the human form.
I started to think that it would be cool to have an original depiction of my injury drawn by Bryan hanging on the wall of my office, or even better at my home, just so that people could say, ‘Eeeeeeeww, gross!’ followed quickly by ‘But cool drawing!’
And so the idea of hanging Bryan’s images on walls was born.
Months later, as I was making the transition from Newsweek to teach at Michigan State’s School of Journalism last year, I visited Bryan and told him that I wanted to have an exhibit of his 3-D artwork at the university. I knew nothing of academia or putting up an exhibit, but I figured they’d have a blank wall somewhere, or, even better, a real gallery. In my college, the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, they had no gallery, but the dean let me make one - out of a classroom.
I covered the cinderblock walls with foamcore board, made prints, and hung the show. Bryan’s coming to MSU to speak about his work on Thursday, and I hope he likes it the exhibit.
The brochure (designed by Bryan)
http://igconference.org/bryan_brochure.pdf
His talk will be broadcast live (audio and video) over the web, so please tune in: www.wmsu.org. Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007 at 4:30 p.m. and the show runs through November 16.
Luckily, the new gallery has a really soft carpet . . .
No good for handstands.
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An article about the exhibit:
http://streetanatomy.com/blog/?p=193
