Crack!

On Monday I met with my DI team. That's Destination Imagination, for those of you not in the know. It's an off-shoot of Odyssey of the Mind -- a task-based creative problem-solving challenge with a dramatic element. We've been meeting for months now, once a week, trying to get our performance (a mystery in which a crime must be solved using a gadget which works using the properties of visible light) ready for the tournament this Saturday. It's actually been coming along pretty well. The deal with DI is that it's very kid-centered. No adult "interference" is allowed, so we team managers have to sit back and bite our tongues a lot.

Anyway, on Monday the kids were finalizing some details. One brought in two long poles, plus two buckets filled with gravel. When a sheet was duct-taped to the poles and they were stuck in the buckets, voila, we have a back-drop. Because part of the challenge requires a visual effect, they decided to project their scenery onto the sheet using my overhead projector. Pretty cool. The other project was to build a pair of "stilts" for one of the characters in the play -- the only "adult" character. After sorting through a bunch of materials, they went with a pair of five-gallon buckets, turned upside down, and made straps out of foam and the ever-present duct tape. The resulting "stilts" looked sturdy enough, and we began rehearsal. All went well for about twenty minutes. Then, in a move that I've been re-playing in my head for the last two days, our stilt-walker took a step that was just that much too big, and toppled over sideways, snapping her right arm with a sickening crunch. It looked like a second elbow in the middle of her forearm.

She remained amazingly calm -- much more so than me or N, the other team manager. I grabbed her arm and straightened out the bones, then held it in attempted traction while N called the paramedics and the parents. It seemed to take forever for anyone to arrive. The other members of the team, who hadn't seen the full extent of the damage, nonetheless realized that something serious was going down, and stepped up. They cleaned up the room, put all the props away, and quietly worked on our team sign. When the girl's father got there, just minutes after the ambulance, and heard the story, he was furious. It was a scary moment. I didn't sleep well at all that night, worrying and second-guessing myself. "I should have..." "We shouldn't have...."

I didn't feel better until I saw the girl at school Tuesday morning, arm well-wrapped and in a sling. They had been at the emergency room until almost nine, and hadn't been able to get a cast since the arm was too swollen to see if the bones would set. She's going back in tomorrow to see if surgery (pins or a plate) will be necessary. The parents have calmed down, (so we probably won't be sued), but I'm crossing my fingers -- a break while under my supervision is bad enough, but I would feel even worse if she had to have surgery. In the meantime, our DI team still has the tournament this weekend, and we're scrambling to re-write our play just in case she can't participate! Yikes. I'm really looking forward to taking a couple of days off next week for my cousin's wedding. I could use a trip out of town....