I Guess My Memory Is Starting to Slip, Was It the 2nd or the 4th?

In the summer of 1982, I broke my hip while playing Babe Ruth League baseball. I was running in for a fly ball and misjudged it a little bit. I planted my right foot I to keep from running forward. I caught the ball, but my cleat got caught in the ground and I fell onto my knee.

At that point, I felt a shock go through my body. I got up and felt pain in my knee and went to the doctors the next day. My doctor took x-rays of my knee because that's where the pain was, but he couldn't see any damage. So he sent me on my way.

For the next few weeks, I was walking with a limp and could not run very fast at all. Weeks later, sometime in September, I was at my sister Margaret's house when I fell over one of her kid's toys and landed on my knee again. I remember getting on the couch and I couldn't get comfortable sitting down, standing up or laying down. Margaret, who is a nurse, put me in her car and took me to the emergency room.

My doctor showed up and they took more X-rays of my knee and still couldn't figure out what was wrong. I was in the hospital for almost a week, getting shots in my leg every six hours to kill the pain. After a couple of days in the hospital, my mother noticed I was laying with my leg bent and I had my foot turned out to the right. My mother brought that to our doctor's attention saying that she works in a nursing home, and whenever one of the elderly broke their hip, that was the only way they could lay comfortably.

The doctor immediately ordered more x-rays, but this time he took x-rays of the hip. And sure enough, my hip broke through the socket of my pelvis. He pulled out the original x-rays of my knee and in the very top of the X-ray, in the shadows, you can see a hairline fracture of my pelvis. That happened when I was making that catch weeks prior.

He apologized for not checking the hip when it first happened and explained to me all about deferred pain. That's when one part of your body is injured, but yet you feel the pain somewhere else.

I ended up getting transferred from a hospital in Carbondale, to a hospital in Scranton where an orthopedic surgeon put three pins in my hip. I know it was the first week of November in 1982 when it happened, but now I can't remember if it was the 2nd or the 4th.

For years I thought it happened on my mother's birthday which is November 4th. But I thought it was Election Day too. The reason I thought it was election day is because my father was the Judge of Elections at the place where people from my neighborhood voted, and he couldn't be there for the entire day of my surgery.

But now looking back, election day was on November 2nd that year and my mother's birthday was the 4th. So it was one of those two days that I had my surgery, but now I'm not sure which one it was.

I think I may request my medical records from the hospital just so I can put my mind at ease as to which day it was. I wonder if they still have medical records from back in 1982. Getting older sucks.