Fateful 2010...

From the age of 15, I had at least a year of my 'post high school' life planned already. I was moving to England to live with family, and travelling through the Queens Land working in Historic pubs... I had been waiting for my 18th Birthday with great excitement because, after roller-blading since I was 5, I would finally be able to join a Roller Derby team. For those of you who don't know what roller derby is, basically there are two teams of women on roller skates, who travel around a track (similar to the roller domes they use for cycling), trying to score points whilst practically beating the crap out of each other... *vague explanation*.
Now, for someone who had 14 fractures, breaks and tendon/ligament tears in 4 years, roller derby is not the kind of sport you want to be playing.! I know this in hindsight, but at the time, it was the best idea in the World.. Just like some peoples high school perms haha!
Anyway, I had just graduated from High School in late 2009, meaning I was no longer playing soccer and was no longer breaking, tearing and fracturing myself to pieces. Within about 2 months of leaving school, my knees seemed to not sublux and give way as much, and I was back to flying across the pavement on my inline skates, doing 6 to 10km round trips every day, rain, hail or shine and short early morning beach runs with my beloved dog Max. I felt fan-TASTIC.! I felt alive and I felt free, nothing compares to that feeling for me, when I'm flying along on my skates, feeling my muscles tense and flex, feeling the rain splashing on my skin, dripping down my near frozen nose. To me, that is one of the greatest feelings in life. I suppose you can already guess where this is headed...?

January 26th 2010.
I had received a phone call from the coach of a local roller derby team, inviting me to come down and have a trial that Friday. I still wasn't allowed to "join the team" until I was 18 in three months, but that didn't mean I couldn't start training earlier.. right.?! Can you imagine my excitement.?!?! I was finally getting a chance to do what had I longed to do for so long, I was over the moon and filled to the brim with excitement.! My good friend Gem had lent me her roller skates and I was straight out into the street practising. I set up obstacles and my Maa was giving me tips and pointers on how to transition from inlines to skates, I was so gosh darn excited that I practised for 4 hours in the street.! I was finally doing this.!

January 27th 2010.
Come evening, I had shared my news with my whole family and was so excited, my friend Nikhita was sleeping over so we could laugh and giggle into the night. Mum asked if we wanted to go for a walk and Nikhita said yes, but my brother and I decided we were going to go to the abandoned car park by our house on our inline skates so I could practise my backwards corners. Maa's words to me before they embarked on their walk were exactly as follows.
"You've practised enough, you're just tempting fate now. You'll do fine at the trial, just come for a walk instead..."
My reply, "don't worry Mum, I'm just going to go for a little bit and then my brother and I will come straight home, no big deal".
After my mother's 'I'm warning you to be careful' look, we went on our little journeys and my father stayed home in the warm.
My brother and I were having a blast, jumping over the road islands and doing our zig-zag cross-overs, and of course, the backwards corners. We were about to go home when I decided I just wanted to do two more laps, just to nail the corners.
The first lap was fine.
The second lap, I took the final corner and hit a large rock, which flipped me 180 degrees, and I ended up landing on my right knee, on a ragged boulder.
*Just so you know, I have a weird kind of pain tolerance. When I break a bone or snap a tendon or tear a ligament, I hardly feel anything, and just know that something is very wrong. But if someone pinches, scratches or grabs me, it feels like fire on my skin.*
My reaction to my fall was light hearted, and my brother and I were laughing at my error in judgement when I looked down at my knee... which was now black and twice its normal size. That very wrong feeling immediately appeared, my stomach jumped and twisted and a soft "shit" was said. With my brothers help, I bladed home and immediately iced my disgustingly coloured knee, whilst my Father went on about my fragility and how I should "live in a hospital, because it'd cost less to rent a room there than keep on having to go back and forth." Mum's expression was less than impressed, and a huge "I told you so".

The next morning, my Mum and Nikhita helped me to the car, as I still couldn't put any weight on my knee, and shuffled me off to our Doctor. After begging and persuading him to recognise there was something wrong (he thought I was a hypochondriac, but that's another story), he sent me to get X-rays.
Three different people scoured every millimetre of my film before a very lovely Chinese man noticed a small black dot on the base of my femur. I was sent back home to await an appointment opening with Dr Gerard Hardisty, with the instructions Rest Ice Compression and Elevation and to begin weight bearing once I am able to.
I'm glad to report that we purchased the crutches from our local pharmacy at a discounted rate because of the number of times I'd had to hire them over the past 4 years haha.