Saturday, December 18, 2021

Reflecting On My Recent Accident

The day after my fall I posted on Instagram a photo of me sitting in a wheelchair outside the skating rink, smiling with a bag of ice on my ankle.  This paints a relatively simple picture suggesting I just had an "oops" moment and now I needed to get my leg fixed up.  But while I was feeling ok at that moment, it doesn't really capture what I really felt only a few minutes prior.

Pain.  Searing, blinding pain.  Pain like I have never felt in my life.  The feeling that you're going to pass out from the pain it hurts so badly.  I remember laying on the ice with my skate folded underneath my other leg, and I couldn't even see straight.  The panic that CC might have been hurt too since I was holding her hand when we fell.  My heart was racing and my forehead was covered in sweat, despite just laying there on the freezing cold rink.  I remember Jeremy telling the referees that he's a physician (thank God for that), and I remember his voice as he talked through several attempts in straightening my leg and removing the skate from my foot.  I don't remember how they got me up off my back and into the wheelchair, but I am pretty sure I didn't help in the process.

And then I felt ok.  I guess it's all relative, but at that point I was feeling better and figured I just had a sprained ankle and I had been a baby.  I called my spouse from the locker area and informed her of "the dumb thing I did".

It wasn't just a sprain though, which became apparent after they did the x-rays and concluded I needed to be transferred to another hospital that was "better equipped to handle this level of trauma".

I spent five days in the hospital.  I should have been out of there in three, but on the third day I had an episode of syncope during my PT session.  Thus I had to wait until they got my pain meds right before I could be safely discharged.

I can feel myself starting to sweat whenever I think about those moments.

It's hard not to feel like it's just yet another reason for me to be depressed about 2021.  Like I didn't already have enough weighing me down.

I'm not writing any of the above to solicit sympathy.  Mostly it's just me trying to work through what I suspect is some mild PTSD.