My 1 1/2 Biceps
July 25th, 2008 by ComputerBob
It was a cool Fall day in the Frostbite State in 2003. I had already spent several weeks getting our house ready to put up for sale. Now I had finally worked my way down to finishing some of the minor things that make a house “show” better to prospective buyers.
That morning, I was trimming the bushes under our living room window, using one of those giant scissors-shaped manual hedge trimmers.
Things were going pretty well until I encountered a branch that was more than an inch in diameter. I should have walked back to the garage and gotten some sort of saw, but you know what they say — hindsight is 20/20.
Instead, I positioned that too-thick branch into the “notch” in the hedge trimmer that was designed for branches up to about 3/4 of an inch thick. And I started to squeeze.
Instead of cutting cleanly through that branch, the hedge trimmer barely moved. I decided to try “nibbling away” at the branch by cutting into it a little bit, rotating the hedge trimmer to a slightly different angle, and then cutting into it a little bit more.
Still no progress. It was a tough branch.
By that time, my arms were both aching from squeezing the hedge trimmer pretty much as hard as I could squeeze it three or four times. So, I stopped for a minute, to let the achiness drain away.
When I got my second wind, I repositioned the hedge trimmer, and with every ounce of strength in my arms, I squeezed it, expecting that branch to finally give up and fall to the ground.
For about 5 seconds, nothing happened. Neither the branch nor I was willing to give up.
Then I heard a loud, sickenenly “sloshy” sound. Less than a second later, it felt like someone had stabbed me in the right arm.
I dropped the hedge trimmer and quickly examined my right arm. It didn’t look any different, but it hurt so bad that I couldn’t even lift my right hand. I had to let the whole arm hang straight down from my shoulder.
If I had been smart; if I hadn’t had an intense fear of hospitals; I would have immediately tried to drive myself to the nearest emergency room.
But I wasn’t smart, and I had an intense fear of hospitals — the same fear that surfaced again last year when I had a stroke but kept it a secret from everyone until almost 24 hours later — so I put away the hedge trimmer, went into the house, took a couple of pain reliever pills, and lay down for awhile.
A couple of days later, my entire upper-right arm was black and blue. It took several days before I could lift my right hand. It took almost 2 months for the black and blue to go away. It took over a year before I could carry a 1-gallon container of milk in that hand. It took at least 2 years before my entire upper-right arm stopped constantly aching way down inside, like a “tennis elbow” feeling.
I’ve been told by medical professionals that I tore my right bicep. The “sloshing” sound that I had heard was my bicep muscle “snapping” and rolling back up to my shoulder. If I had gotten medical attention right away, they might have been able to cut open my arm, stretch that muscle back to the right place and sew it or pin it into place. But there’s no guarantee that any such surgery would have worked. And I couldn’t have afforded to pay for it, even if it had worked.
So now I have 1 1/2 biceps. I think my right bicep is almost as strong as it used to be, but I don’t know for sure, because I try to never strain it at all any more — but it’s definitely much stronger than it was after I tried to cut that one branch with those hedge trimmers.
To tell you the truth, I really don’t remember if I ever finished trimming those bushes or not.
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