Let me preface this with a note: To everyone who has ever suffered from an injury- I don’t care how small- and has or is working through it, this one's for you. This blog is also for Deo Tibba Base Camp Trek, which showed me my own strength again. As a true Texan would say, hang in there y’all.
I write this blog to all of you on July 27, 2018.
On July 27, 2017, one year ago on this day, I laid down, terrified (although I tried my best not to show it), on a hospital gurney for shoulder surgery and slowly counted down from ten into oblivion as Valium was pumped into my bloodstream. It struck with such immediacy- anaesthetising me to the world, to pain, to anxiety and to what had happened three weeks prior.
In a moment of human error, I had forgotten to re-attach my front bicycle brake wire before embarking on a steep mountainside descent, leaving me to uncontrollably accelerate, launch head-first off my bicycle and land in a ditch, unconscious for an hour with a broken shoulder and bleeding in my stomach.
Sounds fun, right?
Now, after doing nothing but my favorite thing, climbing mountains, skiing and adventuring, nonstop for months, I suddenly found myself unable to walk to the bathroom without the help of others, being put to sleep for shoulder surgery. I was weak.
I woke up in the sling that I would become very familiar with over the next several months.
I worried that I would never be able to do my favorite things again. Last week I was scaling peaks, and now I’m stuck. I was bored, I felt fragile.
I know this sounds incredibly dumb, but sometimes I would just look at my bandage-covered, sling-bound shoulder in disbelief and wonder where the heck mine went.
Then I decided it was time to stop acting like a lump. This, I realized, was not a time of defeat, it was a time of healing, rest and renewal. I was determined to live by the principle that a broken shoulder in no way meant I had to have a broken spirit.
