I dangled from the second of three giant steering wheels, my right arm stretching to grab onto the third one. My fingers barely grazed the side of the wheel when I felt my left hand starting to slip. Realizing that I wasn't going to make it to the third wheel before I lost my grip on the second, I turned around and headed back to the play structure, where a line of kids had started to form. 'I will get to the end of these monkey bars before the end of the summer,' I thought to myself, determined to accomplish that goal.

However, after that day, I would avoid those types of monkey bars for a long time. I don't know if I was pushed by the impatient kid at the front of the line, or if I had lost my footing on the play structure, but, either way, I ended up on the ground.

I must have landed on top of my left arm, because the next thing I knew, I was picking myself up off the ground, cradling it close to my body as if my life depended on it. The fall wasn't that big, maybe three feet from the ground, but the pain was like nothing my six-year-old self had ever felt before. I remember screaming, nothing else, no tears, just screaming.

A nearby camp counselor came over and walked me back to the school. "It's broken," I cried decisively, over and over again as we crossed the street. "I think it's broken." At this point, I had rivers flowing from my eyes.

"No," the counselor said, trying her best to calm the hysterical six-year-old walking next to her. "It's not broken."

"Yes, it is," I insisted stubbornly, refusing to accept any other conclusion.

"Can you move your arm?" she asked me as we approached the building.

Slowly, gently, I unfolded my arm from my body, straightening it as much as possible. As I did this, I felt a sharp pain shoot through my arm. It felt like my bones were grinding against each other just a few inches above my elbow.

"See," the counselor said upon watching me move my arm. "Not broken."

I want to say that I gave her a look that read, 'Are you blind! Can you not see how painful it was for me to do that!' but I think I was too shocked to look at anything besides my arm. Surprisingly, I was able to move it normally, but the pain from doing so was unbearable.

-oOo-

Once inside, the counselor that had walked me to the school from the playground led me to sit at one of the tables in the cafeteria where we spent most of our time. After a few minutes, the head counselor came over with an ice pack wrapped in a purple flower baby blanket that was used for the baby dolls. She had me hold the ice pack to my arm while she went to call my dad.

During the time we spent waiting, I continued to insist that my arm was broken, desperate to convince the counselors that I was right. But they just kept trying to calm me down, telling me that my arm wasn't broken.

When my dad arrived, the counselors said that I had fallen off the monkey bars and hurt my arm.

"It hurts really badly," I told him as we headed to the car.

My dad drove me to the Henry Ford Hospital, which was about a seven-minute drive away from the school. There, the doctors brought me into a dark room to get an x-ray of my arm. In the center of the room was a large table that reminded me of the ones used in meeting rooms. At the end of the table was a chair. One of the doctors had me sit in the chair while they sat in a chair that was located to my right. Above the table was a weird looking machine that hung from the ceiling.

The doctor had me place my left arm on the table as they moved the machine so that it was above me. They then used the machine to take pictures, telling me to hold my arm in different positions for each picture. One of the positions they wanted me to put my arm in was too painful for me to do, so they brought in a cube of grey foam and had me rest my arm on that, which helped a little bit.

When they were done, they led me back to the lobby where my dad was waiting. On our way out of the dark x-ray room, we passed through a hall full of computers. On a few of these computers, I saw pictures of bones that had been broken.

Back in the lobby, I waited with my dad for a while before one of the doctors that had brought me to the x-ray room came out with some papers in his hand. He spoke to my dad and showed him the papers, which happened to be my x-ray pictures.

Apparently, I had broken my humerus bone in half just above my elbow. They didn't have anyone on staff that could perform the surgery I needed, so the doctor sent us to Beaumont Hospital.

Sometime before we left, they put my arm in a splint and wrapped it in gauze to prevent the bone from tearing through any veins, muscles, or even skin.

"Do you want to see your x-rays?" my dad asked me once we got in the car.

"No," I said. Even though the pain prevented me from thinking about much else other than my arm, the idea of looking at my x-rays still made my stomach do summersaults.

On our way to Beaumont, my dad called my mom and told her what had happened.

-oOo-

At Beaumont, I spent a few hours in the ER before they moved me upstairs to a hospital room. The room had enough space for two hospital beds. I was placed closest to the window, leaving the other space open for another patient that might be brought in.

I'm not sure why, but the nurses didn't want to give me any pain medicine. However, due to how much pain I was in, I wouldn't eat, so eventually, my mom, who had met up with me and my dad while I was still in the ER, managed to convince them to give me an IV.

They probably would have been better off putting me to sleep before giving me the IV, because the second I saw the needles I refused to cooperate with them. As a result, they had to get my mom to hold me down. Each shot felt like a canine tooth biting into my skin. I wasn't much more than flesh and bone when I was six years old, so the needle got stuck in the bones of my right arm a few times before they were able to get the tube in my right hand. Once the IV kicked in, I fell asleep and didn't wake up until it was time for them to move me to the pre-op room the next day.

Sometime while I was asleep, my IV infiltrated and the pain medicine had worn off. My mom and I waited in the pre-op room for a while before a doctor came in to see us. He spoke to my mom, telling her that he had another surgery to do before me, and since the patient was five and I was six, she got to go first. I was in a lot of pain and wasn't thinking straight, so I told the doctor to hurry up.

Before he left, the doctor asked me what color cast I wanted. "Rainbow," I said, being completely serious.

"Well, we don't have rainbow," he said. "Does pink work?"

I nodded in agreement. After he left, an anesthesiologist came in with a red liquid in a medicine cup. The liquid in the cup was a combination of pain medicine and sleep medicine. The anesthesiologist told me to drink the medicine. It was supposedly cherry flavored, but, like most cherry flavored medicines, it was bitter, tangy, and didn't taste anything like cherries.

As the medicine started to kick in, the doctors started moving me to the OR.

"Are we going home?" I asked my mom, as the effects of anesthesia started to take hold.

The last thing I remember before losing consciousness is entering a bright white room.

-oOo-

As I was waking up in the recovery room, a nurse handed me a purple teddy bear. In the corner of my eye, I noticed the hot pink cast on my left arm.

I don't remember being brought back to my room, but some time in the evening, my dad stopped by with a life-size, stuffed dog from the hospital gift shop, as well as a few packs of silly bandz.

After he left, a nurse put Pinocchio on the TV for me to watch. However, I spent more time sleeping than I did watching the movie.

In the middle of the night, another little girl was brought in with a broken arm. I didn't see much from my hospital bed, but later my mom told me that the girl had broken her arm while jumping on her couch and that her bone had ripped through her skin. Compared to that, my injury seemed like nothing more than a paper cut, and the story made me very grateful for that.

The next morning, my mom and I changed into the clothes that my dad had brought us the previous morning. I didn't want to stay for breakfast, so we left as soon as we were ready.

-oOo-

I had my cast on for six weeks, and when those six weeks were over, my mom took me to a medical clinic to get my arm looked at. She had me take some pain medicine before we left the house, but she didn't tell me that I would be getting my cast removed, and I knew nothing about the metal pins that the doctors at Beaumont had put in my arm to hold my bones together.

When we got there, the doctor took us to a room that had two benches, which also functioned as beds, on either side of the room. The doctor had me, my mom, and my three-year-old sister sit on the bench that was on the left side of the room. Then they asked me and my mom a few questions before having me follow them into an x-ray room similar to the one at the Henry Ford Hospital.

After they had taken enough x-rays, they determined that I was ready to have my cast taken off. They then took me back to the room that my mom and sister were in, where they cut my cast into two pieces. I thought that was it, that I was done, but no, they still had to remove the pins that I hadn't known existed until that moment.

I didn't like seeing blood, so I looked the other way. The first one came out painlessly. The second one hurt slightly, as the pain medicine had started to wear off. The third one got stuck, causing me to scream in pain. It felt like my arm was being ripped apart from the inside.

At that moment, a little boy walked in with his mom. His eyes filled with fear when he saw the doctor removing the third pin in my arm, as if to ask, 'Wait, are they going to do that to me?'

When they were done, the doctor wrapped a bandage around my arm where the pins were and had me move my arm. I tried to straighten it, but it felt stiff. The doctor told me that it was normal and that it would take a while for me to be able to straighten it.

About a week later, my parents took me and my sister to Michigan Adventure. By this time, my arm was mostly back to normal, but I still couldn't straighten it all the way. It was getting to the point where my mom was thinking about having me go to physical therapy.

Fortunately for me, while we were waiting for my dad to get off a ride, my sister was dragging me around and, accidentally pulling too hard, straightened my arm for me, as well as providing me and my parents free therapy services. Because of this, I'm now hyper extensive in my left arm.

-oOo-

After breaking my arm, I swore to myself that I would never go near any type of monkey bars that moved. However, as I got older, whenever I saw what I've always referred to as spinning monkey bars, I would try to get from one end to the other, until either the summer between seventh grade and eighth grade or the summer between eighth grade and ninth grade, when I finally mastered them. Today, I'm too tall for any kind of monkey bars at a kids' playground to be much of a challenge, but, if I wasn't, the spinning monkey bars would come as naturally to me as standard monkey bars. To this day, even if I don't remember the event itself, I remember the excitement that I felt when I made it to the other side of the monkey bars, when I realized that I had nothing to fear.