When Fear Conquers

Snowboarding
When: 2009/ 2010 Winter season
Where: Homewood Resort, Lake Tahoe

The air was cold. In fact, I could taste its crisp emptiness. It was like breathing into a bag of ice chips. All around me the world was white--the trees, the slope, the cabins, the people, even the sky reflected a piercing white brightness. My excitement to finally be here, to be at the intimate Homewood Resort, was mixed with a feeling of stinging cold. I wasn’t the greatest boarder on the mountain, not by a long shot, but I was there ready to ride the white beast.

At first, I practiced my S curve. My toe side posed a huge challenge, so much so that I fell and fell again, sending up poofs of white speckled snowdust. I had been in first gear for a while, taking it easy until I was comfortable and confident. But I quickly grew impatient, and so shifted gears. The crave for speed was just too tempting to ignore. That and I felt like putting on a bit of a show for my boyfriend. You see, he’s an English bloke--fully equipped with many of those Briton stereotypes. And of course, as giddy as he was to have eased into the sport in the two short months since being introduced to snowboarding, I wanted to one up him. Bloody Englanders! I thought so perfectly smugly. I’ll show him how it’s done!
I kicked it into a higher gear. The sound of my board carving through the snow as I cruised down the mountain was exhilarating. The cold wind stung my face, but I pressed ahead in defiance. I was flying!
Then, quite suddenly I got iced. I felt the earth under me change; I had skidded over a patch of ice which sent me flying through the air. I fell flat on my butt, and the impact sent a crystallized explosion of pain piercing through my chest. I panicked, and tried to sit up but the pain just doubled over. Defeated by the pain, I laid down and cursed the air with my cries and screams. I was certain I had broken at least a few ribs--that was how it felt anyway.
Within moments, my boyfriend was by my side trying to determine what was wrong. His efforts to calm me down failed, and his instructions for me to relax flooded in my expletives. It fucking hurts! I cry out, as though it were his fault.
Finally, after what seemed like an indecent amount of time had passed, the medics arrived. Like mechanics tending to a broken engine, they went to work. One of them broke through my layers of clothing to determine if there was any punctures, which thankfully there were not. The other, held my head up, asking me questions to get me focused on something other than the bloody pain. He wore reflective blue sunglasses and sported a thick, scruffy beard, but had a warmth that I trusted instinctively. His crooked smile did all it could to give me a boost of confidence, that everything would be alright.
Next came the oxygen. Kind of ironic that they would try to feed me oxygen through a tube when I was surrounded by tall cedars in the middle of white winterland. Suffice to say, the medicinal oxygen and I did not make a friendly acquaintance. It tasted like plastic, inorganic, and only made my insides colder. Thankfully, the woolly-bearded medic could tell that it added further discomfort, and said he didn’t think I needed it anyway.
Lying there as helpless as a fish out of water and still unable to move, the men wrap me in tarp. I’m feeling more like a Mexican main course than a human being at this point. Once I’m secured, the skiier drags me along behind him to a plateau where a ski mobile is there waiting for us. I wonder what that’s for. I naively think. Next thing I know I’m being dragged behind the skiing medic who in turn is being pulled by the snow mobile.
The pain!
Every bump on the pain was a twelve inch dagger being plunged into my chest. My outbursts and pleas for the gentlemen to go slower were muffled by the snow mobile’s engine. I cried and if it were any colder my tear drops would have turned into ice crystals. After the longest 7 minutes of my life, we finally reached the bottom of the mountain where more medics were there waiting. They bombarded me with questions, trying to determine what was wrong. At last they put me on a gurney and inserted my lump of a helpless body into the ambulance. With the mountain, the red medics on skis, and my boyfriend all behind me, I found myself in the back of an ambulance with a friendly EMT. He gave me some heat packs to warm by body. What a blessing that was! I must have asked a dozen and a half times for them to turn of the heat in the ambulance as my body began to thaw.

“Do you need to go to the hospital” he asked.

Ok Becky. I tell myself. Man up! The pain is in your head. I just need to sleep it off. I’ll be fine. I try to psyche myself out, when another shot of pain rippled through my body.

“Yes! Take me to the hospital!” I reply.

En route, the EMT tells me he’s got some morphine to ease the pain. The terrible part about this is that he needed an IV to get it into my body, and for whatever reason, he could not find my vein. So after a few tries on each arm at playing pin the tail on the donkey, except that it was put the needle in my vein, he gives up. No pain killers, more pain.

I arrive at the hospital, more questions from the doctor. He moves his hands across my chest like he’s some kind of Renaissance sculptor. ZING! he finds it. He tells me that it’s probably a broken rib, and there is nothing to do but let time heal the wound. Fuckin ay, so much for the instant miracle of science and technology. The doctor gives me some vicodin and calls it a day.

By the time my boyfriend arrives, I had already gone through the whole process of playing back the incident in my head over and over again. We go back to the hotel where I quickly learn that going to the bathroom is a two-man job. The five or so vicodin I took starts to make me nauseous. I make for the bed and stay there the rest of the night.

Over the next four months, I’m bedridden. My body must remain straight at all times, bending only at the knees. Whenever I need to get out of bed, I need help. When I need the bathroom, I need help. When I need to get dressed, I need help. It took about three weeks before I could actually sit up, and that was with a considerable amount of help. By the end of the 4th week, I progressed to getting out of bed by myself, albeit it at the pace of a 90 year old woman.

With the 2010 snowboard season quickly approaching, and knowing how my close friends cherish the sport, my experience still haunts me. While I don’t want to miss out on the fun, memories of the pain hold me in terror. Though I did go snowboarding once after the incident, it was an abomination. I must have fallen a zillion times, probably as a subconscious mechanism to show myself that not every fall will be rib-shattering. Nonetheless, I am left wondering if I can ever overcome my fear. And to this day Lance Armstrong’s quote haunts me: “Pain is temporary. Failure lasts forever.”