When I was fourteen, I broke a leg playing sandlot football. As these things go, it was a bad injury—the right femur was broken in two places above the knee. A four-inch piece of bone was floating alongside the broken ends, and my right knee wound up under my left thigh. Ironically, my two best friends were the ones who put the scissors tackle on me.

         The ambulance came. I still remember the look on the EMT’s face when he straightened my leg to put me on the stretcher. The poor guy almost turned green. I was taken to the local hospital, and then transferred to the Children’s Hospital in neighboring South Bend, Indiana.

         If this same injury had occurred today, they would simply drag you off the field, shoot you up with happy sauce, cut you open, bolt a titanium plate on the break, sew you back up, and send you out to play the second half.

         But things were different then. It was 1954. The actual treatment consisted of traction for six weeks with the leg elevated and attached to a system of pulleys and weights. Every day the doctor would come in, look, say “Hmmm,” adjust the weights and leave. By the end of six weeks, the leg had been stretched back out and the broken piece miraculously maneuvered back into place. I was then sent home and immobilized for July and August in a full body cast up to my armpits. It was a pretty miserable time. There are a number of stories connected to that period, one of which involved my pet hamster Louie.

         Those six weeks I spent in the hospital taught me a lesson I have never forgotten. There were four other boys in my ward, all seventeen to eighteen years old. Jerry had polio, a disease almost unheard of today. In the fifties polio was a big thing. It left Jerry unable to move anything but his fingers.

Doc had gone off a high dive and landed wrong. His back was broken, and he would require a long and painful series of operations that had just begun.

I never did understand what was wrong with Ed, but his legs were paralyzed and had been for some time. He was back in the hospital because of bedsores (pressure ulcers), which as I later learned were poorly understood at the time.

Bob, the fourth boy, had some kind of degenerative spinal cord disease and was dying.

Since I was the youngest (and the newbie), I was obviously in need of tutoring, and instruct me they did. I soon learned the nuances of playing tricks on the nurses and how to deflect their retaliation onto my wardmates. It was a game to keep up flagging spirits, and those wonderful nurses played along.

All the physical aftereffects of my broken leg had pretty much disappeared after two years, but Jerry, Doc, Ed, and Bob were still in the hospital with little improvement, little prospect of healing, and little to no chance for a normal life.

         My injury changed my life. Along with a heart condition, it pretty much ended my athletic career and it changed the way I looked at things. My broken leg, added to the usual teenage crap (raging hormones, rampant emotional swings, and a lot of moaning about how the world doesn’t understand you), certainly tempted me to feel sorry for myself. But whenever that happened, I would recall those six weeks with those four boys. From that point on, no self-pity for this boy.

Not then, and not ever again.