Testimonials

I have a degree in Creative and Professional writing. What that means is I spent three years studying how the written word has the power to influence people. Well I say studying, my girlfriend at the time lived a door down in the flat we shared… So I studied… Sometimes… A better example would be my other posts on here, you can read in the comments how a few humble paragraphs can have such a dramatic effect on people. What I’m trying to type today is that I was taught about the written word, I learnt the spoken word.

People I know describe me as a storyteller. I also pull some far flung anecdote, or weird tale to get across what I’m trying to convey. Sometimes I get approached to simply ‘tell a story’, to entertain. Which is a huge compliment to my oratory skills now that I think about it. Especially as I can barely string a cohesive sentence together on the fly. A story though, no problem! All I do in actuality is ask myself, ‘What story should I tell?’ then sit back and enjoy the show myself. Enjoy whatever tale flows out of my mouth, whether that’s some random thing that happened to me that I only remember halfway through or something pulled out of thin air. Consciousness would be more accurate I guess. Anyway! Before I write half an essay on my creative process, (If you want that essay, tell me in the comments) I’m going to tell you a story that I told my customers, who would dare to ask me questions at the checkout.

Here’s how I fractured my wrist. (And how I fixed it afterwards).

The question comes from the wrist brace I wear on my right wrist when I’m scanning objects through my till at 100mph (I work in one of those stores) and is usually a variant of, ‘What have you done, Jay?’

It happened about a decade ago, when I was 16. Yikes, that makes me feel old. So I was in my kickboxing dojo, and was warming up for a sparring session. I was the oldest in my age bracket class by a year or two, and they looked up to me. I was working with a punching bag when the other guys gathered round. ‘Punch it as hard as you can!’ they said. So I did, and as I went to throw the punch, I looked at them. Showing off and all that, big grin. Anyway my fist connects and 

SNAP!

Snapped my wrist didn’t I! Never felt the same after, always had a weakness and slight pain to it. Yeah, I fractured it. A minute fracture right in the centre. Took it to the doctors and they said they didn’t want to operate on it as I was still going through puberty and that could cause more problems. Anyway I do the whole Uni thing and come back. The bone’s regrown over the fracture but not healed the fracture itself, so the surgery they can do is a nightmare. They’d have to break the wrist to fix it. Totally not worth the risk. So I slap it in a brace and get on with it.

Now here’s the thing with that story. Everything happened as told up until I said I fractured it. I had gone to the doctors about it, they didn’t really know what had happened and said they didn’t want to do anything further because it might fix itself over puberty. The rest I made up as it stops any further questions being asked. It is easy to explain it away as a fracture so I can fit the whole thing into a couple of minutes, because I’m still throwing shopping at the audience with a queue of disinterested people behind them. Short and efficient but leaving them feeling like it was worth asking. That’ll be £84.62 SIr, cash or card?

I go about my days, telling this story to anyone who wants it. Then I feel something give in my wrist. Crack really, audible too. A shooting pain rocketed up my arm. I was just carrying a box of stock at the time. There was absolutely no reason for it to happen, but I knew instantly what it was. My wrist had just fractured, on its own, on some random Tuesday or whatever. The nerve! Whenever I was working, my wrist was in its brace. No more ‘I’ll put it on once when it feels weak or when it hurts’, because it always did. I had told a story that had fractured my wrist. Talk about power! I’d just broken a bone.

Now we work in healing the body. We all have the power to do so. It took me a while to connect the dots. On the one hand, I can bend time and turn a necklace into the best defensive armour in the world. On the other, I have a fractured wrist. What’s a guy to do? Get help! 

“Hey family, can you sort my wrist out?”

I shook my wrist for roughly five minutes. Then poof! It feels exactly like it did before I punched that punching bag, back when I was getting into a boxing ring every week! A miracle! Funny that, being part of a group that works with them everyday. 

Now I’m not perfect, I still catch myself telling the story from time to time. A quick ‘I consciously disagree with this story’ and ‘My wrist is perfectly fine’ sort out any negative effects of it, but it's still a work in progress. That does mean that I still slip the wrist brace on. But now that brace is the ‘scan faster 3000’ enchanted to further speed through the week’s food shop that has filled my till belt, because apparently 45 items a minute is not fast enough for management.

I think that’s the moral of this story. Race me if you dare!