Jake's (broken) bones

Here's a bone I never expected to write about !

Yesterday at cross-country club after school I slipped back and fell and there was a crack and immediately my right leg felt extremely painful and I couldn't move. I was covered up with coats and the headteacher called an ambulance and dad who was off work that day came with my baby brothers.

An ambulance came to take me to hospital. Luckily it was the hospital where my mum works. They put me on a stretcher and put me in the ambulance and my head teacher came too but the wheel of the ambulance got stuck in the mud and they had to get a tractor to pull it out !

When we got to hospital mum and dad and my brothers were waiting. I was given some medicine and went for an x-ray which showed the break above.

Here's the top picture again. It shows my right shin with the ankle on the left and the knee out of shot to the right. The top bone is the fibula and the bottom bone is the main one, the tibia. The fracture is called a spiral fracture and it is caused when the ankle twists one way but the knee doesn't and the tibia breaks inbetween. Doctors said this was a good break because the two bits of bone were where they should be, and the diagonal break means there is a lot of surface area for the new bone to grow inbetween.

The hospital put a temporary cast on by using loads of bandages wrapped round which  had been soaked in a white plaster. The cast will come off on Monday with a new one going on. Then it will take four or five weeks to heal, which is quicker than an adult because my bones are still growing.

This is another part of the same x-ray. It shows my knee joint with the femur (thigh bone) above and below is the tibia (big shin bone) and fibula (small shin bone). The tops of the tibia and fibula are in two parts, just like the bones I find of young animals (like this baby red deer I found last autumn) because the growth plate is between them, where the new bone grows. The doctor said if the fracture had been across the growth plate it would have been bad (a bit like my roe skeleton George where one femur (thigh bone) was shorter than the other).

Anyway I won't be going on any bone-collecting walks for the next month but luckily I have some posts already planned that I can write about.

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