How I Got a Short Arm

Living a whole life with one body is quite the experience.

The pony was a grumpy little guy, but I liked him. I liked his rotund belly, but it made it hard to cinch the girth strap. The girth is the belt that keeps a saddle on a horse, or a pony.

His name was B. Happy. He was my ride that day for my weekly riding lesson. His face was short and squat; bristly hairs lining his muzzle. Lashes framed his brown eyes, regarding me in the wash stall where we geared up the horses.

“Hey, buddy,” I cooed to him. I was 10 years old. Tall for my age, consistently labeled overweight by the doctors, and other words used by other kids. Black rubber riding boots to the knee over my khaki riding britches.

It was a tandem lesson that day. Another girl was riding with me. We took our rides down to the paddock at the bottom of a slope below the barn. The North Carolina day was overcast. It was the early 90’s. Today, that sweep of once-rural land is a Nissan dealership.

As we rode around the paddock, practicing simple dressage shapes in the ring with our instructor in the middle, a wind picked up. I was trotting B. Happy along the fence when the wind blew a white plastic grocery bag through the rails and into the ring.

He spooked, and before I knew it, we were galloping. Full speed. He saw that bag and freaked out. I was no longer in control. I heard Leslie, the instructor, yelling, but the words didn’t land in my brain. I was flying. The reins out of my hands, which now leaned forward with all my weight on his neck, grasping for mane, for anything.

“Blahhhhhhhh!” Leslie’s voice rang. I’m sure what she was saying was helpful, but I was in a different space. Everything slowed even as we went faster. How could a little guy like that run so fast? We were speeding down the paddock at an angle. He’d have to pull up when he reached a fence, at some point.

But before that happened, the saddle starting slipping. I went with it, gripping with my legs, as it slid to Happy’s righthand side, rolling on that big belly like oiled metal over a ball bearing.

The ground came at me. Oh no. There’s a point on a horse when you know you can’t save things. You’re going to fall off. I felt that, the brown dirt littered with stones coming at my face.

Because I slid off to on side while trying to hold on with my legs, I didn’t let go in a way that would have preserved my head or upper body. I flew off the pony onto my helmeted head, then my right shoulder, my whole overweight body coming to rest on my right side. My right arm under me.

It probably looked quick to everyone else. Plop. My mom watching from the parking area at the top of the slope by the barn. Leslie on foot, running toward me. The other girl, turning her tall horse with a firm hand on the rein, to see what had happened.

Thank god I was on a short pony that day.

They knew pretty quickly that I was injured. Mom says, to this day, she knew when she saw one tear slide down my cheek. I was a stoic kid. I didn’t react much to pain, or teasing, or yelling.

The right humerus was fractured in two places. Not a full break, but they had to immobilize my arm. When you break that bone where it was broken, they don’t give you a cast. All a kid wants is a cast, a cool plastered badge of glory for other kids to write their names on. I didn’t get that. I got a weird foam body brace that wrapped my abdomen, under my shirt, that my right forearm strapped into, to hold it at a stiff 90 degrees, for weeks.

The spring weather turned turned hot, and I sweat inside the thing. I couldn’t wait to get it off. That day came, and childhood went on.

I was tall at 10, remember, but I grew a couple more inches the next few years. I started noticing, as I grew, that my right arm didn’t lay flat or in the same way as my left. If I laid on the floor and bent my elbows, arms raised, and nested my hands behind my head, my left arm upper arm laid flat to the ground, while my right angled up, elbow lifted.

I could raise my arms in the mirror, standing, and my left hand reached higher than the other.

I showed Mom, but she thought I was being a silly kid, goofing around. “Anyone can make their arms do that,” she said. Okay.

But then, it became more noticeable. The right humerus, the one that broke, definitely looked shorter than the other. She pursed her lips and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. I think you’re right.”

She made an appointment with an orthopedist. They took X-rays. I sat in the room, a sloppy tousled kid, bigger than ever. Taller than my mom now.

The doctor wore a turban and had a big, bushy silver mustache. I thought about how much it must tickle him. He was kind, but serious when he said, “Your right humerus is 1.25" shorter than the left.”

“Oh my god,” Mom said. Her big bifocals refracted the overhead light.

The options we were given were this: Break the left arm and take an inch out. Or rebreak the right, put in an extending device, and turn it a millimeter everyday til the bone grew.

“Do I have to?” I asked, looking at Mom. Baffled by the violence of the solutions. Dirt coming at my face all over again.

“No. We can wait and see. Some of it depends on how much more you grow. If you grow a lot, it will become more and more noticeable,” he said.

We did not break my bones. I did not grow much more. I’d gone through puberty early. Though being so tall at an early stage suggested I might keep going, I did not. And that was that.

I’ve lived for decades with a short arm. It makes a good party trick.

Something that happened when I was 10, a slip of chaos in a blowing bag come from some grocery store, used to load some person’s carton of milk and hump of bread, absent-mindedly blown out of their trash on pickup day, blowing across the acres of farmland in central North Carolina, to come into that ring when I was riding B. Happy with his hard-to-cinch belly, has stayed with me and my body this whole time.

I grew up. I lived lots of places. I developed other injuries, over time. Spondylolisthesis Grade 2 of my L4 vertebra. Scars all over my legs. I took up smoking and turned to it for many years—who knows what damage inside that’s done.

We drag these things with us for so many years, our bodies. They take us over hills and into wilderness. They sleep and never sleep. Give us migraines. Bleed and smash. Get scanned by doctors. Take vaccines for the viruses. One day, they die.

Isn’t that wild? A whole life in one body. Here she is: my 10-year-old me, taking this photo at age 43. Showing you my short arm.

Be kind to your old war horse today. ~ Lisa