Monday, June 11, 2012

On knowing my pain....

In the grand scheme of things, I'm pretty lucky when it comes to injuries. I've never broken a bone (that I know of...I might have broken a toe before, but it didn't hurt enough to go have it checked out) despite cheerleading and skiing basically my entire life. But there are two injuries I have had that make me cringe just to think about. Because they HURT.

The first was when I was in grade 8 and got into a pretty nasty car accident at church. My friend was pulling her parents van around to the front door, something the regularly let her do. It was a small church with an even smaller parking lot, so this wasn't a big deal. Until that day. She slammed on the gas thinking it was the brake and rammed us head on into a light pole. I bashed my head into the dash board and my glasses shattered. I ended up in the ER with probably a reasonably-sized concussion. I don't think I've had a headache that bad ever since and that includes the time I had to get a CT because my doc thought I might have a tumor and/or  aneurysm (I didn't). The worst of it all was that the accident happened the day before end-of-year finals at school and I forgot almost everything I'd studied in the previous weeks. It was horrible. I barely passed most of my finals that year despite being granted a significant amount of mercy from my teachers.

Then when I was probably in grade 10 or something, I was horsing around on our trampoline with my brother and damn near snapped my femur. Now, I realize it takes quite a bit to do that, but I came very close that summer. He and I used to play this game where one of us would sit in the center of the trampoline while the other would run around and the sitter would try to grab the runner's ankles and trip them. It was actually quite a lot of fun! Except for this one day when we failed to put the mats around the edges. I dodged my brother and in the process, my right leg fell through a set of bars and springs and I tumbled over the edge, leg still stuck in the bars. By the time I was able to right myself (with a little help from my brother), I had already developed a black, green, and purple bruise the size of a volleyball on my thigh. My mom, not knowing what had just happened and reacting solely to my banshee screams, told me to "walk it off." Then she saw that I couldn't exactly walk. That one...well that hurt for a while. Which made cheerleading practice that summer quite challenging.

I'm telling you, both of those injuries hurt way worse than either of the times I stepped on rusty nails.

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