I used to think I was invincible on skis. Not in the Olympic, adrenaline-junkie, GoPro-mounting kind of way. More like: I'm in my early 20's, I’ve been skiing for years and I never fall. Ever. I’ve cruised through icy moguls, navigated narrow tree runs, and somehow avoided the spectacular, cartoonish wipeouts that seem like a rite of passage for most people on the slopes. It wasn’t that I was amazing at skiing. I was just... stubbornly vertical.
But like any good Icarus flying too close to the sun, one day I came down too hard. The yard sale was vast and the pain was immediate. I knew things had gone terribly wrong and so did the coven of ski patrol that gathered around and bundled me up for the ride down the hill in the uncomfortable little sled of shame.
For those of you who haven't experience the joy of a free ride down a mountain from the dear souls who help injured skiers, I can attest that it's less fun than it looks. For reasons that to this day still escape my scope, they put me on the stretcher facing head down the mountain, and then towed me along behind a skier who I'm confident dodged towards bumps on the trail. My head was so disproportionately full of blood compared to my feet, that I'm a bit surprised I didn't just simply die from the pressure. And those sleds leave a lot to be desired. If I ever become insufferably rich, I would consider funding sleds with shock absorption, because the only things absorbing every bump down that god-forsaken mountain was my skull.
When I got to the base, the indignity didn't end. I was unceremoniously piled into an ambulance for a 3 minute ride, the equivalent of around 6 blocks, for which I later received a $250.00 bill, and then pushed into a bay in the ski resort's on site ER.
And then I waited.
I was very hungry because this nightmare ordeal had brought me to lunch time. My bag with my lunch was just out of reach. I could see the doctor across the hall eating a sandwich. I hated him.
I waited some more. I waited so long I almost achieved inner peace. Almost.
A few hours later, after seeing the doctor and being wildly misdiagnosed (as I would discover later), I was bluntly told to leave the ER. I was young, tired, hungry, in significant pain, and absolutely suffering from shock, but most importantly I had NO SHOES. I became hyper-focused on this one fact. I was being asked to leave the hospital, in the winter, with no footwear. Where on earth was he proposing I go???
A nurse finally came in to shoo me out of the room and I just burst into tears, sobbing incoherently about snow and my feet, and having nowhere to go because I didn't even know where I was in relation to my car. I didn't even have anyone I could call because my friends were all still skiing, because ski passes are expensive and you do need to get your runs in.
I was stuck, I was shoe-less, and I was without a good means of communication because this was the final throes of the dark ages where smart phones weren't really a thing yet. So I waited some more, this time in a cold waiting room where the nurse had finally relented to let me stay, with one bare foot because no army could have convinced me to wrestle my foot into a ski boot and risk jostling my knee.
Eventually the rest of my party returned and with them came a new problem that I hadn't considered until that point. I had driven us there, and it was glaringly obvious that I would not be driving us home. Normally, this would not be a problem, however at that time I had a sporty little standard transmission vehicle, which was neither designed for passengers with massive new leg braces, or for people who normally only drove automatics.
My (not yet) husband stood by the open driver’s door, looking at me with a mixture of concern and dread—not for my injury, but for the fact that the only way to get home now meant he had to drive my manual transmission car.
I walked him through it from the passenger seat, gritting my teeth and trying not to snap as he stalled twice before we even left the parking lot. “Clutch in—no, all the way in. Now slowly ease off while you give it gas.” He muttered something about how this shouldn’t be legal, how no one should have to learn this under pressure, but to his credit, he kept trying. Every lurch and stall sent a jolt through my body, and I did my level best not to pass out so I could be available for questions if they came up. Eventually, the car jerked into motion, and we crawled along the road like a newborn fawn finding its legs. It wasn’t pretty, but it was enough, and within a half an hour he was bas. We got home.
From that point forward, my life was an endless stream of doctors and specialists, 3 different diagnoses, x-rays and MRIs, all to determine that I had bone marrow edema in my knee, and I couldn't walk properly for more than a year.
Was this the end of my ski career? No! I was still young enough to be surprisingly dumb, and so four years after my first accident I tried skiing again. I was still good. For the entire season, I was good. And then, on the last run of the last day of our ski season, I strapped on my wax wings, threw up a middle finger, and jumped for the sun.
I remember laying on the snow in my little pile of pain and hubris, and all I could think was I will not go down the mountain in that fucking sled again. So, with gritted teeth and a vocabulary that would make a sailor blush, I stubbornly side-slipped down the last half of the run, hobbled into the lodge, and waited for my (still not yet) husband to bring me the car.
The miracle here was that just like the first time, I had not torn anything and had recreated the special conditions that lead to another round of edema, and another year or so of staggering around. The only upside to this injury was that it had something of a routine to it now, and recovery wasn't quite as painful as the first time.
The third time I injured my knee I stood up out of a chair while pregnant and tore all the cartilage in the offending appendage. No cool story, just somehow simultaneously the most serious and least exciting of the three knee-related events, and what I believed would be the kiss of death to any future ski days.
My specialist just looked at me and said "You really want knee surgery, don't you?"
Will our hero ever ski again?
Will her knee pain haunt her as she ages, until eventually becoming the arthritis her specialist told her she should definitely have after being so cruel to her joints?
Yes and YES!
Come back for part two of this riveting ski saga where we find out that Jamie has absolutely not learned anything from past behaviour, and will continue to leverage that misplaced confidence for your reading pleasure.