The United Fraternities and Soroieties of the Cast

Membership is simple: Break a castable bone.This of course leaves out toes, ears, and most face bones. Anything else is fair game. As long as the bone is fractured or broken and there is a predominate cast on it, you can join one of these Greek societies.

This Fraternity/Soroity comes with the same membership like applications that other Greek organizations come with. First is the initial application. This can be done in several ways as long as the end result is a broken bone with a cast on it. Some are victims, I mean applicants, of circumstance: They break their bones in car accidents. Some are heroic applicants: They break an arm by allowing the beam of a building to fall on them instead of the innocent child or puppy that the beam could have fallen on. There are double heroic points if the potential disaster involved both children and puppies. Others won't take much thought to their application process. In fact, not much thought is involved at all: These are the dare devils; the stunt doers; the adrenaline seekers. These are the people cwhose parents looked at them at birth and knew instantly the little cute child in their arms would, at some later date, mount some angry bull, fly through the air and land on a completed application to join the fraternity or soroiety of the Cast.

Folowing the application comes hell week. Real men and women take on hell week in the summer. Weak applicants do it in the spring. Hell week consists of having x-rays where the x-ray tech has you place your broken bone into positions that would have hurt, even if your bone wasn't broken, all in the name of getting the best shot. This is followed by a doc, usually of the Emergency Room variety, constantly pushing on your hurt area to confirm that it actually does hurt, before puting the cast on.

After this exchange, Hel week is ready to move into the second phase. If a leg is broken, you get to learn how to put only 15 pounds on that bone when in actuality you weigh 145 pounds. If it is a broken arm or WRIST or hand, you get to learn how to do the most mundane things, like tying your shoes or washing your hair, withonly one hand. These activities are further complicated by the increased energy required for these tasks thus making you sweat and making the skin under your cast itch.

As Hell week wraps up, the final test of Hell week is a patience test. Unless you're still in junior high school, most of your days aren't spent with people randomly coming up to you with a permanet marker in hand asking to write on your arm. However, as your last test of hell week, this is exactly what will happen. Like a collection of random tattoos by non-artistic people, your cast will soon be a mosiac of your patience.The patience test comes frrom people writing slowly, misspelling words and by them twisting your cast in ways not even the x-ray tech dared twist you. You must wait for these sadistic people to stop. After this, your Hell week is over.


Mebership does come with priveledges. For example, you are different than those who have never broken a bone before. You have that experience over them. Additionally, you have the right to seek out other people with casts and tell them embellished, exaserated stories of how you got your broken bone, what 8 million things went wrong while you had it on (including losing your job, losing your signifgant other, or you being convicted of a crime and being sent to prison because everyone assumed you were the one armed-man), and then finally being able to relate how long you were actually in the cast and then adding 2 months (or 2 years depending on how guilble your pledge is).

The best privledge is: Once a member, always a member. From now until the day you die you can look new Pledges in the eye, glance at their cast and proclaim "Oh that's nothing. I rescued 1,000 people from a burning building before the structure fell apart on mer, breaking my arm in 102 different places. I happened to live on the equator at the time and spent my summer down their recuperating. I'm a better person for it. You go that riding a handcrank cycle? That's nothing!"