A Most Eventful Meet

I’ve always been prone to freak accidents. Once, in fifth grade, I got a black eye from PE golfing, and I’ve even had a paper cut on my eye, but the oddest accident-and-injury pair I’ve ever experience happened at a swim meet my sophomore year of high school.

It was about three events before the 400m relay, my last event of the meet, and I was perched on a deck chair, back to the stands, idly watching the swimmers and chatting with my teammate. It was a double-dual meet, twice as many swimmers on the deck as normal, and as such I didn’t register the sounds of the commotion behind me until a blunt, harsh pain struck my head, upper back and most of all my neck. All of the sudden everything got really loud, the pool got even more hazy than normal, and everyone seemed to be moving and yelling at once. I distantly registered the people rushing and the odd sight of a large line lying flat on his back on the concrete a few feet in front of me, but it made no sense and besides my instinctual clutching of my neck and tears streaming down my face (I don’t handle pain well) I might as well have been frozen. I felt like I couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

The scene of the crime

Finally, a sharp voice broke through the haze, and I responded with as much obedience as I could manage to my swim coach’s instructions to not move my neck (lifeguards are paranoid about neck injuries) as they waited for the ambulance to arrive. It took me a while to realize that some had just fallen off the bleachers onto my neck, and I honestly don’t remember being strapped onto the rescue board, then later the ambulance (although I distinctly remember being embarrassed to be in an ambulance wearing only a competition suit, swim cap and neck brace). Luckily there was a quick recovery and minimal lasting damage, but at the moment I was in so much pain I couldn’t think and very much need someone I recognized as an authority to marshal the well-meaning crowd away and tell me what to do, and thankfully that came in time to help prevent further damage to my neck.