Why I Love Ace Bandages

While hugging the carpeted walls of my high school in my too-short pants (in the days when floods were an anathema) and bulky sweaters, trying to escape the notice of my peers, I often saw the district’s celebrated athletes crutching their way down the center of traffic, sporting their sprained ankles and blown-out knees packed in ice like donor organs. As the weeks went by, the ice disappeared to be replaced by mid-calf sports socks pulled up over the bulge of Ace bandages.

I helped the district’s physical therapist for a few weeks, exploring a possible (and long-discarded) gateway to the future. I learned to unroll and reroll Ace bandages over rainbow-colored puffy joints, tightly enough to provide support without cutting off all circulation. I learned to view Ace bandages as stinky extensions of their wearers, saturated with foot and ankle sweat and the slightly putrid smell of injury.

Then in college I had the opportunity to personalize my Ace bandage experience. A flying high-kick leap in flip-flops through the doors leading into the dorm lounge resulted in a popped ankle which swelled to the size of a grapefruit in about twelve seconds. My friends, all of whom, might I add, I dwarfed by about a foot, made a chair with their Superman-strength arms and carried me back to my room. I was on crutches for six weeks. I used a lot of Ace bandages. It became a form of art to wrap my ankle just so while it turned all shades of green, yellow, purple and black.

But my favorite Ace bandage experience topped off my senior year at Grove City: Children’s Theater. I was cast by the inestimable Hannah Fischer as Otter in The Wind in the Willows – a character distinctly male, robust, middle-aged, and jolly, complete with a "man gut." To transform myself from tall Amazonian woman to tall boisterous man, I pinned a few half-bolts of cloth together, held it to my middle, and had my friends wind me up from neck to Abercrombie waistline in Ace bandages. It was so successful that I even had a little bit of cloth pudge hanging strategically over my belt, and a small dimple that, under a shirt, looked like a belly button.

I obtained six bandages from the Nurse's office in order to be a successful man-mummy. Of course they didn’t want them back; so when Earl the Man Gut had to return to the scrap pile from whence he came, I rolled the Ace bandages into a plastic bag and kept them. You never know, I said.

Since then I’ve used them infrequently. Sometimes the old sprain acts up and I have to wrap it. And when, last night, I melted the skin on a small section of the heel of my hand taking biscuits out of the 450 degree oven by leaning briefly on the rack, I used a bandage to make a mummy of my hand around a Ziploc baggie of ice cubes for about an hour. Eating creamed chicken and biscuits with one working hand and one club with a thumb was interesting.

And today the burn, while rather ugly, is not even blistered.

And I couldn’t have done it without the Ace.