It was friday September 4th, the time was about 5:30 pm. It was kind of a gloomy day, clouds in the sky and 77 degrees in royal oak. I was driving myself to my dad's house. I had just left my friends at great lakes crossing and I was close to my final destination. I had brought my scooter along so that I could ride it around when I had spare time, then I remembered that there was an old skate park about five minutes away from my dads. I pulled off of Adams Rd. into a neighborhood and called my dad.

“Hey, Dad. I’m almost there, but is it alright with you if I stop at that old skatepark on crooks and thirteen mile?” I asked.

He replied “Yeah that’s cool, I’ll see you when you get here. Should I order the pizza for 6:00?”.

“Yeah, sounds like a plan. I’ll see you soon”.

“Okay, be safe.”

I put my phone away and drove to the skatepark. When I got there, I noticed that there was nobody around and didn’t think much about it. I got my scooter and helmet out of the back of my car. I walked through the gate that lead into the miniature park consisting of three ramps and one rail. The park was semi overgrown and had rust and moss smothering the metal on the ramps. I set my car keys on top of one of the bigger ramps yet kept my phone in my pocket.I started riding around and everything seemed to be going smoothly. Then I decided to try and tailwhip over the box, which is a type of ramp. I tried a couple of times and started to get a little bit more comfortable. On my fourth time I jumped and caught the tailwhip. When I landed, my back tire slipped and I fell. My eyes shot down towards the ground just in time to witness my foot grab the cement and get dragged under my leg. It took less than half a second. Time slowed to a halt and it seemed like a full minute. I landed on my back and my head slammed into the ground with with such force that if I hadn’t been wearing my helmet I would have had a concussion. Everything went black for a second yet that was not my main focus. My main focus was a sharp pain coming directly through my ankle and into the rest of my body.

I glanced down in a hurry to see that my foot had been bent at a ninety degree angle. Wincing at the sight of it I thought to myself, “Oh god, I think this is the day I die!”

“Help! Somebody help me!” I screamed out until my voice couldn’t take it anymore. Nobody was around to help. I knew that the only thing I could do was call someone even. I ripped my phone out of my pocket and dialed my dad’s number… No answer. So I kept on screaming, hoping that there would be somebody out there that would hear my screams of pain and agony. I stared at my foot a little bit closer and saw bone poking through the skin, but I wasn’t sure that it was bone so I wanted to touch it, “Oh no!”

My ankle had already swollen to the size of a baseball. The screaming continued for a minute and then I decided that tactic was useless. Instead, I tried to take pictures so that I could look back and reflect on why I shouldn’t ride scooters. All of a sudden, my dad called me back. It felt like a million hours had passed before he called back.

“DAD! I need your help! I just broke my ankle and I need you to come pick me up!”

“Wait, are you serious?”

“Most definitely! I need help, it hurts so bad”

“I’ll be right there, try to get up and hop to a bench”

So I shoved my phone into my pocket and took a deep breathe. I planted my hands onto the dirty, damaged, dry cement and pushed up with all of my strength. My ankle started throbbing as if my heart had dropped down into my foot. The pain deepened and made me wonder, “why I had even stopped at the skatepark in the first place?” I hopped carefully over to the nearest bench next to the rusted old chain fence door and sat down. I waited for what seemed like another hour until my dad sped into the parking lot. He rushed out of the car and bounded towards me.

“Oh sh**, thats broken.”

He picked me up and set me in the car, then went back to scoop up all of my stuff from the ground. He sat back in the car and drove off, reassuring me that it would be okay. It was then that it occurred to me that Beaumont was two blocks away. Once we got to the hospital, my dad jumped out of the car and ran into the building, then came back out with several nurses wheeling a stretcher. I was set on the stretcher, and as soon as we made it to the front desk the lady that had been sitting there stopped us. She asked me several questions, questions I did not want to answer at that moment.

I was wheeled back into the E.R., and an I.V. was inserted into my arm, immediately having morphine flow through the tubes and into my vanes sending a rush of cold through my whole entire body. An hour and a half went by of nurses entering the room, asking questions, injecting morphine, and looking at my leg before I was finally wheeled into the x-ray room. I had to contort my leg in ways that we’re extremely uncomfortable for me. After x-rays, I sat in the room that I had previously been waiting in for yet another hour as I waited for the doctor to look at the x-rays, dreading every minute of it. Eventually, a few nurses walked into the room and gave me the info on what had happened.

“The doctor checked out your x-rays, he said that you broke your Tibia, Fibula and you dislocated your ankle. The surgeon will have to perform surgery tonight.” They walked out of the room and a few minutes later somebody else walked in and wheeled me to the second floor where I was asked a second series of, at the time, questions that were impossible to answer. They had me take my shorts off and I did that on my own, even though it hurt to pick up my ankle which is what I had to do. After about twenty minutes of questions and getting prepped for surgery, the nurse started wheeling me towards the surgery room. in the next moment I woke up to see my dad and my mom sitting next to my hospital bed. I felt a dull pain in my ankle and looked down to see a huge soft cast on my foot. I asked my dad what had happened and he told me the story, all the while realizing how physically and mentally strong of a person I am. My parents said goodnight and went home. After they were gone, I lay in the hospital bed thinking about what had happened and what I had gone through within the past six hours.

“Cool” I said under my breathe.