If you were lucky like me and injured yourself over the summer holidays, you will have let yourself in on one of nature's marvels.
Not pain and misery of course, but the healing process, which needs not one iota of your will or go-ahead to go ahead. In fact, two Bells were to fall foul of physics, and neither enjoyed being part of microscopic marvels, but we did learn a few things that you might benefit from also.
The invention of, ready availability of and peril of the modern trampoline were simultaneously reasons for the insults to our bodies, and within days of obtaining the superstructure, a consumer magazine article bemoaned the lack of trampolines on the market that were up to reasonable safety standards. Oh well, they must be safe to assemble at least.
To cut a short story long, my injury occurred in the shovelling of stones into wheelbarrow, to thwart grass and weeds that threatened to make lush waist high alfalfa grasses under the tramp. Sparing my spine with textbook core stability, I overlooked my right shoulder in the super laden shovel scoop which twanged my biceps like a bluegrass guitarist playing a Bob Dylan tribute.
Youngling number four, who you may remember two years ago as "Nappy Wearing Couch Jumper Breaks Left Arm", graduated to "Undies Wearing Tramp Egress Diver Breaks Same Arm Landing on Stones Responsible For Paternal Injury and Weed Control".
It happened on day three of the Trampoline Era and so we come to my theme — tissue repair, to immobilise or not to immobilise. Supplementary questions may arise on the subject of the installation of dense jelly around the perimeter of trampolines, but I suspect the speaker of the house will rule them out.
Should you immobilise every tissue injury? It seems that there is more than one type of tissue, which is the reason we can do so many things with our bodies, and some should be immobilised, and the rest shouldn't.
Number four most likely broke his radius or humerus again, not so much because the X-ray showed it, but that clinically in the absence of clean cut breaks, he had all the signs and so they bunged his arm in a back slab to totally arrest the bones from moving. You see, delicate is the healing of bone, and as they set back together, if they set ajar, or outside of their prior alignment, you will get permanent change and what we in the game call, very sensitively, deformity. He took it well and happily wore a green cast for four and a bit weeks. Bursting out of the cocoon two weeks ago was a slightly stiff elbow, but that's a happy temporary problem that will right itself for him within a couple of weeks, but for some it may need a bit of extra help from someone like me.