The Little Key to My Heart
The clavicle is a little bone in the shoulder area. It’s also called the collar bone.
The clavicle is the easiest bone in your whole body to break.
The clavicle comes from the Latin clavicula for “little key.”
The clavicle in the Boy’s body is fractured.
***
“Mommy!”
No one likes to hear this cry in the middle of the night. I stumbled into his bedroom and discovered that somewhere between sweet dreams and good morning, The Boy had rolled off his bed. He was crying rather fiercely, but I attributed the cries more to the confused arousal from sleep than actual physical pain. I swept him off the floor, gave him a kiss, and told him to go back to sleep. He did.
The next morning, he complained of pain in his neck/shoulder area. I figured stiff neck or some type of muscle spasm and gave him a hot wrap until he left for school. I sent an email to the teacher and asked that she not let him participate in PE. She told me after school that he was so uncomfortable, she wound up telling him to lie down and rest for the latter half of the school day.
He spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in mild discomfort. I patiently administered kisses and hugs and all the frozen blueberries his heart desired instead of accomplishing anything on my To Do list (but hey, I usually ignore it for lesser reasons than this) and hoped he would be fine by morning.
Morning arrived, and pain was clearly still in-house. He cried to move, he cried to change, he cried in the bath. Husband, the man who never wants to go to the doctor, suggested we take The Boy in for a visit.
***
I take The Boy into the examination room where we have been so many times for eczema outbreaks he knows immediately that I will be reading Curious George to him. That George, calling the fire department, escaping from prison, and flying away with balloons. He so crazy.
Good Doc comes in, I brief her on the situation, and she says, “I bet he fractured his clavicle.” She touches him here and there until her prodding produces the six-year-old exclamation she’s looking for: “Ouch!”
She nods again. “Yeah, the clavicle.”
She puts him in a sling and sends me to the imaging center, where I excite The Boy with the idea of “cameras that take pictures of bones!”
The X-rays are taken and the doctors concur: yes, a clavicle fracture. The Boy is so awed by the X-rays they make photocopies for him as a parting gift.
I hold the black and white paper in my hands, these pictures of his bones. I have another stack of black and white copied pictures of him. His sonograms. Over six years ago, I spent hours gazing at blurred images of a head, a heart, a footprint. Whenever I looked at them, I felt incredibly aware of his life inside me, his movements, his kicks. I look at his x-rays now, and six years later, I’m still aware of that kick in my side, that extra flutter in my heart. He’s grown so much, but he’s still so fragile. Just like me.
We show up to school late, and I walk him to class. Just before we reach it, he lets go of my hand and says he doesn’t need to hold it. “You don’t need to come in,” he says, but he does give me a big hug. I watch from the doorway and he enters his classroom, arm in a sling, brandishing the x-ray copies, saying “these are my bones.” There are oohs and aahs.
He goes to class with a fractured clavicle and gets himself some street cred.
I go home with a fractured heart and get myself some mom cred.
***
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