Hand Grenade and Farmer Boy

Master Hand Grenade's best friend is known as Farmer Boy.  Hand Grenade and Farmer Boy have grown up together, and tackled many of life adventures as a team.  Hand Grenade has physical challenges that require him to work twice as hard as his friends to keep up and Farmer Boy is always the buddy that waits for him or helps him over fences or hauls him up trees.  Hand Grenade is an all-out Marine, a jar-head, a true warrior.  Farmer Boy is quiet, reserved, a farmer to the very core of his being.  They are a great team.

And, they have a history.  When the boys were about 12, they were out chopping wood.  I'm not entirely sure if they were chopping wood, or having axe throwing contests, but it had something to do with wood and axes.  Our families had just shared a wonderful meal, and the boys had excused themselves to go do "guy stuff", when Farmer Boy purposefully strode into the house and requested his older brother Sasquatchs' assistance.  Sasquatch heeded his brothers call and went outside, only to return with Hand Grenade cradled in his arms.

Blood was dripping from Hand Grenade's combat boot and the leather was completely cut through.  After freeing Hand Grenade's foot from the boot, we learned that an axe had sliced into his big toe.  There was blood everywhere, and the boot was garbage, but Hand Grenade was laughing and saying something to the effect of "Pain is weakness leaving your body".  Turns out that Farmer Boy had mistaken Hand Grenade's foot for a piece of wood (or something like that).

Nothing is generally done for a broken toe, so we just cleaned it well, wrapped it up, and got on with life.  Hand Grenade never complained about his toe hurting, we never dealt with infection and we generally never gave the incident another thought (except to periodically tease Farmer Boy about his wood chopping abilities!).  We never gave it another thought, that is, until about 3 months ago, when Hand Grenade took the rare opportunity to walk through the house bare foot.  His foot was deformed!  His toe pulled up at the knuckle in an almost grotesque manner!  When I asked if it bothered him, he said, "Naw, doesn't bug me at all".  I said good, because if it did they would have to re-break the toe and set it correctly.

The newly fixed toe

And then, about a month ago, Hand Grenade started complaining that his toe was rubbing on the top of all of his shoes.  He was getting blisters and his toe needed to be dealt with.  We took him to the doctor, expecting an x-ray and a date to have his toe re-broken and set (Farmer Boy even offered to do the re-breaking so that we could save on medical expenses -such a nice boy!).  You can imagine our surprise when the x-rays came back with no sign of a broken toe.

Young Master Hand Grenade had not broken his toe.  He had severed the tendon.  The reason that the knuckle in his toe was pulling up was that the tendon was pulling it back toward his foot!  And to top that off, the tendon could not be repaired.  The injury was too old to properly fix his foot.

After much discussion, we decided to have the bones in his toe fused.  They would go in, drill a hole in the bones and put a screw through the end of his toe so that as he continued to grow, the bones in his toe would fuse together.  In doing that, the tendon would not be able to continue to pull back and cause problems with his shoes.

Convalescing in our room

On Monday, Master Hand Grenade had surgery.  He now has a screw and a pin in his big toe.  The pin should come out in six weeks, but the screw won't be taken out for years (if ever).  Farmer Boy was the first person here to see Hand Grenade after surgery.  He reminded Hand Grenade that "pain is weakness leaving your body".

This is the stuff of boyhood.  These boys are walking side by side on their way to manhood.  As a mom, I can think of none better than Farmer Boy to walk this walk with Hand Grenade.  We are blessed beyond measure.