So, that was quite something. It was April 20, a Thursday, the last day of Junior year. A couple of my friends decided to hang out after school and it started out normal. We headed out in Z’s truck, five teenage girls smashed into one vehicle excited to finally be free from the constraints of high school life. First stop was to get smoothies from a coffee shop, and then we were on our way to terrorize the grocery store. One of my friends, (we’ll call her Raven) and I had made a plan to go shopping for swim bottoms earlier that week because it is now summer and we both had impending swimming activities. We found matching cactus men’s swim trunks that were really cute and fulfilled our length requirement to conceal any stray cat scratches iykyk. Then Raven bought a whole chocolate cake which she proceeded to eat when we got back to the truck.
We decided that it would be fun to go to the gardens in my town, so we found a place to park and walked down to the back end of the gardens. It was a beautiful day, warm, but too early for there to be many mosquitoes. The gardens have this maze made out of some plant I don’t know the name of, and Raven and I ran around in it waiting for the others to make their way down the hill because they were SLOW and lame and didn’t just half fall down as we did. Jk, I love them. There is a wood structure in the gardens that is a gazebo that connects to wooden bridges and a platform, and in the middle, there is a very tall tree. Now, I love climbing trees, I climb one whenever I can, so the first thing I did was kick off my Doc martens and scrambled up that tree. I got to the top which is 25-30 ft off the ground and was having a great time, until the branch I was clinging to snaped.
I fell straight back and hit the ground, knocking the wind out of me. All I remember is being plunged into darkness and struggling to breathe. Then I was up on the platform again with my shoes on and all my friends crowded around me. Raven had called my parents and they were on their way. My parents decided to call an ambulance, so when it got to me, they put me in a cervical collar and rolled me onto a backboard. The ambulance ride wasn’t too bad, the guy was really nice. When I got to the hospital I got an immediate CT scan of my neck. Up until this point, I thought that my neck was just a little strained. It didn’t feel broken at all. The thing that hurt the most was actually my nose which I hit on the way down. After my CT scan though, the doctor came in and said “Do you know who Christopher Reeves is?” I did not, but apparently, he is the original Superman who got the same fracture I did, but he got completely paralyzed. I have a bilateral fracture in my C2 vertebrae which is the second one down from your skull, and it is an unstable fracture, which means if I move wrong my head can fall off my neck and I could die or become a quadriplegic and lose function in things like my lungs. That terrified me obviously, but what am I going to do about it right? It is what it is. I stayed in the hospital that night to see the neurologist that was coming to town the next day. My town does not have any neurologist so they were going to medivac me to another town but since she was coming up the next day they decided not to. This surgeon’s name is Dr. Fix which is kind of cool for a doctor.
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