Glass Bone Guy, or the Boi with OI

He was lying in the hospital bed, fingers flying across his tablet, a nice-looking college kid who ended up in the hospital after an accident on holiday at the beach. It happens. He had been drinking and had taken a fall, breaking his pelvis in two places. That last part was novel. 22 year olds don't normally break unless a lot of force is involved: high speed, long drops, crush injuries, etc. The admission note said he was just getting out of a parked car. Upon further review, it turned out he was with a group of male friends at a bachelor party, and they had driven to another location. They were all pretty drunk, and it was raining (very rare event here lately, by the way), and because of the way they parked, OI Boi needed some help to get from the car seat to his wheel chair, so his buddies lifted him across, except the wheelchair wasn't locked and they dropped him into a puddle. It was all hysterically funny and they got him up and back in his chair and the festivities continued but later that night OI Boi sobered up and realized he had sustained more fractures, in fact, he had fractured the 36th and 37th bones of his short lifetime.

"Osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) is a congenital bone disorder characterized by brittle bones that are prone to fracture. People with OI are born with defective connective tissue, or without the ability to make it, usually because of a deficiency of Type-I collagen." --Wikipedia

This particular young man had been able to walk until he was in his teens, with the help of titanium rods tamped down the center of his long leg bones, spine surgery and many foot surgeries, but eventually it was just too painful and slow, so he got a nice light sporty wheelchair, which made him faster than his peers. He modified it to make it even lighter and faster. He graduated high school and went on to college, and was living independently. He flew to California by himself for this party, and to do a little research on his passion, which he told me was beach accessibility for wheel chair users. 

OI Boi needed a few days to recover, but he didn't need more surgery; his bones were expected to heal by themselves. The hardest thing was regaining his wheel chair transfers, because he had to land on that broken pelvis, and because he had to get over the big wheels of his sport chair, without having armrests to press up from, because he had taken them off. 

As in all my stories, I'm not sure what became of him. We sent him on to rehab to build sitting tolerance and work on those transfers before flying back East, where he could stay with his parents for awhile. Maybe he will come back with a business plan for beach wheelchair design; this would be a great town for it.