Six Million Rupee Kid

“Kal. The Ameristani. A boy barely alive. We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better. Stronger. Faster.”

The words above were blatantly lifted from the opening sequence to the hit 1970s TV show The Six Million Dollar Man starring Lee Majors.

Growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, it was my absolute favorite TV show. I did not miss a single show. This is one of the earliest memories of my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Eventually, I decided that I was the Six Million Dollar Man. At the time, we were living on the fourth floor of a building in a flat with two adjacent balconies.

One afternoon when I was about four-years old, I was playing on one of the balconies and decided to use my bionic capabilities to do one of two things: I attempted to either climb from one balcony to the other, or to jump from the 4th floor to the ground. There is no way of knowing my original intent, but the outcome was the same: I fell from the 4th floor balcony to the ground. (In Pakistan’s British floor numbering scheme, it was considered the 3rd floor).

The ground floor patio was mostly cement covered, except a narrow patch of dirt along the edge of the patio, about 15 horizontal feet away from the edge of the balcony. There were also clotheslines and a huge swing in the middle of the patio. Somehow, I ended up missing the swing, travelled 15 horizonal feet forward, and landed in the dirt. Some speculate that I hit the clotheslines, which slowed my fall and toppled me into the dirt at the edge of the patio. Others insist on divine intervention which kept me from hitting the swing or “splatting” on the cement floor. Perhaps someday I will get out my old physics textbook and calculate the trajectory to see if I can determine if I jumped or just fell off the balcony.

The only damage I sustained was a fractured left femur (clean break in the middle). It obviously could have been much, much worse. I was taken to the hospital, where they inserted something in my leg to hold the femur together and put me a full-leg cast. After many weeks in bed, I fully recovered.

The story of the “Six Million Dollar Man” who fell from the 4th floor became infamous in our community. To this day, I still meet people from Karachi who, when they find out my name and where I lived, remember me as the “Six Million Dollar Man”.

I did not observe any long term effects of my injury until recently. When I was getting measured for pants, my tailor looked puzzled as he kept measuring my left and right legs. He indicated that my legs were different lengths. I confirmed this a couple of weeks ago when seeing a doctor for my plantar fasciitis, an injury from running. I had x-rays taken of both my femurs and found that my left femur is shorter than my right leg, and likely played a role in getting plantar fasciitis in my left foot. It is interesting that I never noticed the leg length difference my entire life until I started long distance running.

I now have a new party trick: I can stand on my right leg and swing my left leg back and forth without touching the ground.