The Year After The Night Before

365 days ago on a dark and stormy night in a foreign land, I found myself forlorn and alone, stranded and wounded. Fearing for my life after a horrific accident that would change the rest of my life, seeing months squandered in a painstaking recovery both physically and psychologically...
 

Who am I kidding?!

It was a mild night in at the beginning of the summer, just as the temperature is maturing from spring and I had met up with accompanied a good friend from my Koh Rong days, Dennis, to one of his friends birthday parties.on the promise to myself of not showing him up, I vowed not to drink too much. But then my hand outstretched at the bar and a beer-too-many accidentally fell into my mouth, which later resulted in a slip of footing and a battle with the cobbled streets of Graz, Austria. Curb 1-0 Becca. After much conversation to and fro , everyone decided it'd be best for me to end my evening there and get an ambulance to hospital (much against my wishes... For both ending my night and going to hospital). Once safely strapped in, and with the blue lights flashing, Dennis and I proceeded to take some selfies in the ambulance, joke around with the doctors, then he joyrode a wheelchair whilst I got my diagnosis....a fracture tibia. 

"At least I haven't broken my leg!" I thought. Swiftly being corrected and learning that a fracture is a break. A fracture tibia means I broke my leg. The fun and games ended a few days later when I realized the difficulty showering, making myself a cuppa, the sheer drop that comes with missing a step on the stairs...and that I'd have to move back in with my Mum and Dad for the first time in years...but hey- if it's not a good time it's a good story. Right? And it certainly wasn't a night to forget...if only I could remember most of it.

 

   Needless to say it was a defining moment of my year at least on those (wonky) streets in Austria.

 

The next few months saw me return to La Case de Old Lady y Baldy, after an entertaining conversation with my Mum on the phone which said in a more explicit tone "You're ever so silly, Rebecca. I wonder what thought would've skipped through your mind for you to wonder so carefree around those streets. Your vision must've been clouded through the slight inebriation of one tickle of larger too many" which I did receive a heads up text from my Dad about saying;

"told her not to be to tough wiv u x"

I'm glad I got the heads up, I would've been more glad if my mother had listened that advice. 

 

My active lifestyle of snowboarding, via ferrata, hiking (does dancing on tables count as a sport?) was very quickly reduced to a daily climb up the stairs, a hobble to the toilet, and a hop to the kitchen once an hour. Entertainment I normally source from a social with friends, an excursion to grab a coffee, or a stroll around the outdoors was rapidly reduced to whatever I could find on Netflix, solitaire on my laptop, or the ever-dreadful-but-addictive SCROLL. Eventually I strained my eyes from watching screens all day (and I even convinced myself I had an eyefloater taking over the entirety of my left side vision and a brain tumor...thanks for that one google). It was just a temporary lifestyle change for me, luckily. But it doesn't change how dramatic that shift was.

 

Eight weeks after that initial hangover, my cast was off and leg was free to face the world again. Now resembling a flakey, undercooked, and rolled-on-the-floor-and-covered-in-hair crossiant.