Be a Man

With all the idiotic things I have done in my life, Most of them were the result of the phrase, “come on, be a man!” My friends and I would climb onto the roof of our houses, I can not remember why we felt the need to but we did. This one time we decided to jump off the peak of the roof on a second story house. My friends jumped and landed just fine. I was hesitant to jump off, when I could just as easily go back the way I came. They convinced me to jump by daring me and then adding the “be a man” phrase. With this phrase echoing in my mind I jump off the roof.

As I am in the air I began to realize this was a big mistake. Upon landing I feel my ankle twist beneath me. Unlike my friends who landed on solid ground, I landing in the soft beauty bark. I lay there cradling my foot for a while, before finally getting up and limping into the house. I figured I had just twisted my ankle, I say at my friend’s house for another hour or more. By the time the pain gets severe enough for me to want to go home, my friends’ girlfriends show up and they don’t want to take the bikes they borrowed back to my house. It took me almost 30 minutes to limp 5 blocks to my house while pushing two bicycles.

When I get home, I am too embarrassed to admit that I jumped off of a house, so I claim to have jumped of a big rock. Still thinking that it was just sprained, I iced and wrapped my foot. As the days progressed and my ankle did not see any signs of improving, my mom took me to the doctor. At this time I was still professing that I had jumped off a rock: unfortunately, not knowing the extent of the impact reflected on how the doctor inspected my ankle. When the doctor twisted my foot slightly to check its mobility, I almost stood straight up on the examination table. It took this incident and 2 weeks of walking on a broken ankle for me to finally admit to the size of the structure I jumped from. I was then rushed to a foot specialist to get x-rays. The diagnosis was a fractured ankle, I sheared off the bottom side of the fibula. After having a pin surgically installed in my foot and having to spend most of the summer in a cast, I learned my lesion. It was not “Don’t jump off of roofs,” but “Make sure to not land of a soft incline when proving my manhood.”