On Thursday I was jumping on the trampoline with one of my neighbors. We were practicing flips and were trying to stick them. I landed one and then tried to do another. On my second flip, I over-rotated and landed on my nose. Nothing else hit the trampoline mat. Just my nose. It really hurt and I was pretty sure it was bleeding when I stood up. My neighbor, an 11 yr old boy, looked extremely worried and a little pale. He asked me a bunch of times if I was okay or not. I wasn't bleeding, so I told him I was fine. We continued jumping and flipping. The next day, yesterday, I woke up to see that on the bridge of my nose was a spot the size of a pencil eraser. I poked it and it hurt so I showed my mom. She said it was a bruise, that my nose was rather swollen and that I might have broken it. When she said this, it made me think of something that happened to me last year........
In June of 2008, my sister Jill and I had joined our neighborhood swim team. It was Friday at 9:00am, and our last swim meet had been the night before. We were celebrating the meet with a
Fun Friday, a day when our coaches didn't make us swim laps and we fooled around by having fun. I had been watching my coach preform back dives off the side of the pool and decided I wanted to try. My first one was rather scary as naturally I don't really enjoy throwing myself backwards off of anything. However, I did fine and did it almost perfectly. Then I decided to do it again. Instead of diving, I ended up doing a back flip which, surprisingly, I did perfectly. A couple people had been watching and were telling me how cool that looked. I thought, "Well hey! I did twice before, let's do it again!" Unfortunately, this time, I didn't push off the wall when I flipped, and when I over-rotated a would-be back dive, I smashed my face into the brick edge of the pool side and scraped it on the concrete wall under the water. After that, everything blurs together, but I remember that under the water, my face burned like it was on fire, and that I climbed out of the pool, stumbling and screaming. One of the coaches ran over to me where I was sitting in a pool chair yelling pretty loud and asked to see my face. She gasped when she saw it and yelled at someone to call 911. I never actually saw a mirror or picture so I have no idea what I looked like. A couple of moms grabbed towels and a chair and made me lay on it. Someone called my mom and shortly after she arrived, the ambulance got there. I remember a bunch of people telling me not to pass out and me replying that it hurt too much to pass out. They thought I had broken my neck and put me in a neck brace, which was so uncomfortable. The E.M.Ts were really nice and got me into the ambulance pretty quickly. I am pretty sure I wasn't crying but I don't really remember anything. The ride to the hospital was pretty rough and bumpy. Didn't really matter though cause I was strapped to a hard board thing.
When we got to the hospital I sat in a waiting room for 30 minutes. Then the staff took me to the X-ray room where they took a CAT scan and an X-ray of my ribs. Turned out, nothing but my nose was broken, I cracked my right front tooth almost in half, and that I needed 11 stitches because I ripped open the area beneath my nose and above my lip. Then I went to a waiting room where I laid on the hard board bed thing for 3 hours. My mom and dad were extremely nice and did whatever I asked, which wasn't much since I felt pretty terrible. The nurse numbed me up and then gave me the stitches. They were an electric blue, although I wanted clear. She took off the neck brace and let me off the bed board. I was really sore and tired so I fell asleep, so I don't know what happened after that. When I woke up, it was 5:45pm and the doctor finally had come in and had given us a prescription for some extremely strong pain medicine. We were free to go and left around 6ish. When I got home, my nose and eyes were bruised and swollen and my face had a bunch of cuts and random bruises on it. It wasn't pretty so I just stayed inside for the next week, except for the swim team end-of-the-year party which was on the Monday after my accident. My coaches were really sweet and kept calling us throughout the weekend to see if I was alright. We spend the next few weeks going to doctors, one of which was a audiologist to get my hearing tested. I didn't get my stitches out for a couple of weeks, and by the time I did the swelling was gone and I looked fairly normal again. I have a scar under my nose although now it is really hard to see.
Right now, my bruise is almost gone and I didn't break it. Bruising my nose is not going to stop my from jumping on the trampoline, but I know one thing for sure, I am NEVER going to do a back dive off the side of a pool again......
