You know that sound and feeling you get when cracking a knuckle on purpose? The little pop and a split second sensation of something inside your finger adjusting?
It felt like that, but two muffled pops, a half spin as I tried to brace myself with my arms on an large instrument case, and I lost my balance and fell to the carpet of a room that was being used as a storage closet for a high school band. In that room, at that moment on that evening I spirally fractured my right femur. I had walked into the room alone, moments before the first football game of the season to put on a blue pullover windbreaker that the drum line had given me as a present. I was the instructor of this percussion section. The band director was new and had set out to rebuild the program by bringing in new instructional staff. He was a friend of mine who hired me and I hired my buddy Jim, a college friend, to assist since we also had to write percussion music for their halftime show and accompany the kids to a sleep away week long summer band camp a month earlier on Cape Cod.
Earlier that summer was August 1995. I graduated college in June of that year with a Bachelor degree in music education and while away on a road trip with several friends, I received a phone call at a hotel (no cell phones yet) announcing that I had been hired to teach middle school music in the town where I grew up. Between a road trip, working with a high school drum line in Massachusetts AND landing a full-time teaching gig in New Hampshire, I realized that I was about to have a busy fall. What I wasn’t expecting was a life-altering… fall.
The night I fell in that equipment closet my teaching career was 17 days old. I sat on the floor for a moment. Falling was nothing new due to living with muscular dystrophy. This progressive disease starts at birth and slowly manifests itself in the breakdown of skeletal muscle cells owing to a lack of amino acid proteins that are coded to be made in our DNA chains. Got that? DNA out of sequence or missing? Cells break, regenerate too slowly, muscles lose strength, person loses strength, repeat as we age, progressive loss. It doesn’t hurt, but it sure does suck.
August 1995 was the ten year anniversary of my diagnosis. I used no devices to help me walk and I thought I was crushing life. Sitting there on the floor, two students walked by. Most of the kids had seen me fall before and knew that it was kind of a normal thing for me. They asked if I wanted help. I told them ‘no’ but asked them to fetch the band director. My partner Jim had taken the percussion section outside to warm up before the game started.
The band director, Brian, came in and began to help me up. At that moment my right leg radiated blinding pain and I saw stars. I told him to hang on….my leg must be sprained or asleep from the way I landed. I took a few deep breaths and tried again, in vain, to rise from the rug. No dice. Brian told me to sit tight. No problem there. I was angry with myself for trying to break my fall. Most of the time I didn’t have time or objects around me when I fell, so I would go down like a sack of potatoes. This time I tried to save myself and now sat on the floor wondering why my right leg was hot to the touch and stiff. It never occurred to me that it could be broken. I fell from standing to sitting. Not possible to break anything, right?
Before long, 2 EMT’s came in. They had arrived to cover the high school football game and were already on sight. I joked with them that I didn’t get tackled. It was about 30 minutes to kick off and I apologized to them that I was the reason that they had to leave their post near the field. One woman tried to straighten my right leg after asking me where it hurt and what had happened. I got the blinding pain and more stars again. She told her colleague to ‘get the board’ and that she would need the stretcher too.
“What? I just need a minute here and some help.” I said to her.
“You’re not going anywhere by yourself Patrick. I am pretty sure you just fractured your right femur. We are going to immobilize your leg in an orange protective leg boot, put it on a board and move you to a stretcher so we can take you to the hospital for x-rays. Tell me about your muscular dystrophy. Have you ever broken a bone?”
I was dumbfounded. As they rolled me out of the school and into the back of the ambulance, the band kids were all lined up looking shocked. I waved and told them that I would be back by half-time. No problem and no way was I missing the first show of the year. Plus it was Friday night and I had to teach middle school on Monday. A few x-rays, confirm nothing was broken and onward!
Erroneous I was. Silly I was. In great pain I was.
What followed was a trip to a local hospital, another trip to Boston, surgery to place a metal rod through my right femur that is still in there as I write this, anchored by a couple of screws, a sweet scar on my right hip, a trip to a rehab. hospital to get me back on my feet and a lot of new stories as well as a few x-ray films that I could show my students when I got back to school. The doctors told me to take 12 weeks for everything to heal up and return to work. This was WAY longer than half-time. I went back to work after 3 weeks total. This was the first time that I faced using a manual wheelchair on a near full-time basis. I didn’t care as I was anxious to get back to my classroom and my kids.
The entire point of this post is not for you to be impressed about my return to work so quickly, and not to be amazed that it is possible to break a bone simply by falling to the floor. The point is entirely different and here it comes:
I stated above that my entire teaching career was 17 days old when I fell. The middle school schedule was not kind to us special area teachers back then and to that end I had only seen ALL of my rotating classes 4 or 5 times up to that point. I hardly knew the kids and had no idea about building community or making bonds within the atmosphere of a classroom. I was fresh out of the box with the wrapping still on. I had learned nothing.
The rehab. hospital was in my hometown. Family, friends and my then girlfriend came by to see me on a regular basis. I was not depressed, but I was damn anxious to put all of this behind me, heal, and get back to school and life. I spent two weeks at the rehab hospital. It was now early October and I spent time outside whenever I didn’t have physical or occupational therapy. I read, played the piano in the lobby of the hospital, befriended the nursing staff and re-bonded with Valerie, a woman who graduated a few years before me in high school and was now a PT putting me through my paces as I learned how to walk again with a metal rod in my right leg. I watched the Red Sox get smacked down in the playoffs, worked jigsaw puzzles and wrote lesson plans to prepare for my return to school.
God, Patrick, you RAMBLE worse than an old car. Get to the point….THIS is why you annoy everyone….OUT WITH IT.
Jolly good then.
One sunny afternoon while sitting outside, three 6th graders rode up on their bikes afterschool. All of them were in one of my classes and one of them was a young man who already had been a behavior problem. I was surprised. Then they spoke…
“Mr. Moeschen, everyone was talking about you at lunch today and someone said that you were here at NorthEast Rehab. This is our neighborhood so we decided to ride over here afterschool and say hey and we can’t wait for you to come back because even though you are new, you are our favorite teacher and the sub is so boring and we made you some cards and we want to know when you are coming back and if you can have some candy ‘cuz we can ride to the store and bring you something so when are you getting out of here and how broken is your leg and will you be in that wheelchair when you come back? Mr. Moeschen you should get a haircut before you come back and can we tell everyone that we saw you…they will be so jealous and when you come back please don’t give us too much work, you should ease into it and not work too hard especially if your leg still hurts. Can you drive? Let us know how we can help you when you’re back like if you can’t write on the board or we can get your lunch tray in the cafeteria or your milk and stuff. Will you still be on recess duty?”
That was 30 years ago. I barely knew these kids but had already made an impact. They were exactly what I needed to bolster my career choice at that time. Interestingly enough, two of the kids were named Rachel. The young man was L.J. I remember all of them like it was yesterday. Years after he grew up, I saw L.J. He had gone into the service and was doing well. I don’t know where Rachel and Rachel landed but I hope the best for them also. Thank you kids. You have no idea how much your bike visit meant to me.
Time goes by rapidly and it is true that people can and do remember how you make them feel. Pay it forward. Make them feel valued.
Stay safe, stay awesome and stay tuned. L.J., Rachel and Rachel…happy life to y’all.
Moeschen! 