During a NCAA tournament game on Sunday, a Louisville player received a serious, but not life-threatening, broken right leg that has been described as “gruesome.”

 

Having sustained a similar injury a few years ago where I broke both my right lower leg bones completely off 6 inches above my ankle.  I caught my right foot in my wheelchair wheel and drove over it, violently twisting the leg and breaking the bones as I drove to my doorway of my office with my right foot hanging off the foot rest, as I often did without incident, to speak to our safety director in the next office.

 

I felt no pain, even as I drove my wheelchair back over my foot so that the safety director could replace my foot and straighten it out on my wheelchair foot rest.  I immediately left, alone, and drove to the emergency room where I got three x-rays of the foot and ankle..  While the 500 pound chair had left deep tire tracks on my shoe, I was relieved to learn that there was no injury to my foot other than some minor bruising.  Only one of the x-rays showed the breaks on my leg, but the doctor examining the x-ray never saw it.  I returned to work and thought nothing of it.

 

After fifteen days of having difficulty sleeping at night and developing a sore on my right heel, I went to my rehabilitation hospital to have it checked.  The intern that moved me to an examining table in the room immediately determined that my leg was broken.  I got a boot put on the leg. It immediately begin to heal, including the pressure sore on my heel, and was completely healed in about five months.  There was no surgery or resetting of the bones.  I was 65 at the time and supposedly had lost bone density from being paralyzed.

 

Instead of the NCAA championship, I watched “The Walking Dead” marathon with a lot of blood and gore and protruding bones and internal organs.  However, news media everywhere are hiding pictures of the young man's real injury because they are afraid that young minds will be affected by seeing something so “gruesome” as a compound fracture.  When I was in Boy Scouts at the age of eleven, we were taught how to care for a compound fracture.  Sure, the guy had to have surgery to correct the bone, muscles, tendons, and so forth that were injured, but he will be back to playing basketball before long.

 

I think we live in a society where fantasy violence and gruesome gore is considered to be far better than terrible “sex” scenes of people actually in love and protect our sports and children from terrible accidents on the sacred basketball floor.  We have even “sanitized” wars so that only the soldiers and their immediate families and friends know the real horror that happens to our wounded veterans after they return from glorious battle with remote or unknown foes.

 

I think it's time we get real and smell the roses.  Our children and sports fans should recognize real violence when they see it and not have to rely on fake violence in video-games, movies, and TV series to understand what it's really about.

 

Copyright 2013 © Ronald W. hull