Out with a Crunch
I'm sitting at my gate at Oakland Airport, clutching a ziplock of ice to my nose. Not my typical pre-flight ritual, mind you, but definitely a necessary step before today's flight to London.
My paying job is coaching at my parent's gymnastics center in Northern California. It's a wonderfully happy place to work, full of excited children and driven athletes. Yesterday, during the last half hour of my last shift on my last day before taking off - a took a gymnast to the face. This is somewhat of an occupational hazard of being a gymnastics coach, where legs and arms tend to flail as children tactilely learn the phrase "body awareness", but yesterday was different. I prepared my gymnast to do a mill circle - a popular skill kids like to teach themselves on the playground where they sit stride on the bar, lift their front leg, and circle forwards with enough speed to bring themselves back to the top of the bar. As she enthusiastically dove forward, a large crunch sounded somewhere inside my head, and a wonderfully shocking amount of blood began to stream down my front.
My (extremely) kind coworkers stepped in immediately, grabbing the latex gloves and lysol as I sprinted to the bathroom. My gymnast is alright, although understandably a bit shaken up. After a call with the ER nurse and very gingerly icing my nose on and off, my parents asked me if I feel okay to go to Greece. I'll admit, when I was cleaning myself up, I was crying partly from the pain but mostly because I thought this would throw a wrench in what I've been planning and preparing for the past three months. All the fundraising, reading, packing, budgeting, bus tickets and flights - what if I had to send my Volunteer Coordinator a message to tell them I'd broken my nose and couldn't come? My parents shared their broken nose stories (which a surprising amount of people I know have), and I resolutely called my doctor and told him he could cancel my afternoon appointment, because I was definitely going.
Admittedly, I am probably being ever so slightly dramatic (okay, fully complaining loads). Having never had so much as a nosebleed up until now, let alone any broken bones, I have no gauge of how painful something like this is supposed to be. My friend suggested that this is likely a good omen, that the worst is likely out of the way before it's even started, and now I can feel certain that I'm "tough enough" to carry on. I'll probably stay away from Ritsona's after school football matches for a few weeks though.
My paying job is coaching at my parent's gymnastics center in Northern California. It's a wonderfully happy place to work, full of excited children and driven athletes. Yesterday, during the last half hour of my last shift on my last day before taking off - a took a gymnast to the face. This is somewhat of an occupational hazard of being a gymnastics coach, where legs and arms tend to flail as children tactilely learn the phrase "body awareness", but yesterday was different. I prepared my gymnast to do a mill circle - a popular skill kids like to teach themselves on the playground where they sit stride on the bar, lift their front leg, and circle forwards with enough speed to bring themselves back to the top of the bar. As she enthusiastically dove forward, a large crunch sounded somewhere inside my head, and a wonderfully shocking amount of blood began to stream down my front.
My (extremely) kind coworkers stepped in immediately, grabbing the latex gloves and lysol as I sprinted to the bathroom. My gymnast is alright, although understandably a bit shaken up. After a call with the ER nurse and very gingerly icing my nose on and off, my parents asked me if I feel okay to go to Greece. I'll admit, when I was cleaning myself up, I was crying partly from the pain but mostly because I thought this would throw a wrench in what I've been planning and preparing for the past three months. All the fundraising, reading, packing, budgeting, bus tickets and flights - what if I had to send my Volunteer Coordinator a message to tell them I'd broken my nose and couldn't come? My parents shared their broken nose stories (which a surprising amount of people I know have), and I resolutely called my doctor and told him he could cancel my afternoon appointment, because I was definitely going.
Admittedly, I am probably being ever so slightly dramatic (okay, fully complaining loads). Having never had so much as a nosebleed up until now, let alone any broken bones, I have no gauge of how painful something like this is supposed to be. My friend suggested that this is likely a good omen, that the worst is likely out of the way before it's even started, and now I can feel certain that I'm "tough enough" to carry on. I'll probably stay away from Ritsona's after school football matches for a few weeks though.
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