When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #60

60-High school is over – the ride down the rock slide and my neck really hurt!

Have you ever done something daring and it didn’t turn out so well? Maybe you did something really stupid!

Well it was summer; we had just graduated a month earlier from high school. My friends had some free time and wanted to go swimming. We had this neat little place just outside of town in the foothills where the water tower stood. There was a little stream below. Just a little up the hillside was an irrigation ditch, which flowed with water. It had a small wooden dam (gate) that you could move up and down. If you put the little dam down the ditch would fill with water and over flow.

There was one particular spot that had a natural rock slide formation and the water spilled over the top of the ditch and down that rock slide. It was probably about 30 feet long and about 30 feet wide and at the bottom was a little stream. You could let the irrigation ditch overflow and the rock slide was wet and you could slide (like a water slide) down to the stream and splash! It was a lot of fun! The problem was that I was ‘afraid to slide’ down the rock slide. There were about 5 of us that went there. They were all sliding and having a great time and tried to coax me down the rock slide.

Looking down from the top of the rock slide to the bottom on the left side there was about 3-feet wide and 3-feet longer than the rest of the rock slide. The stream at the bottom had about a 2-foot sand bank. There were rocks in the stream. Well everyone would slide down the center of the rock slide to land in the stream. I finally got the courage to do it. However I didn’t balance quite right and leaned a little bit too far on my left and I slid from the middle over to the left and you slid down pretty fast! Where the extra piece jutted out was where I went and it projected me too far and I did not land in the stream. I was thrown forward into the bank and my forehead smacked onto a big rock! OUCH! I had quite a knot on my forehead and it hurt pretty badly. I felt sick to my stomach and had quite a bad headache.

My friends ran over to me to check to see if I was okay. I remember getting up and saying something like, “Ouch! I don’t feel so good.” My friends saw the knot on my forehead and walked me back to their car and took me straight home. My mom took me to the town clinic. Doc Klump checked me over and said I had quite a knot and slight concussion. There was another doc in the same clinic that knew chiropractic adjustments as well. I remember lying on my back and he came in and said I needed a neck adjustment. He popped my neck and you could hear this loud ‘crack’! My mom jumped up and Doc Klump rushed in. I guess they were checking to be sure my neck wasn’t broke. It felt okay but later that night I was sick to my stomach. They never once took an x-ray of my neck and back. I look back on that now and I was quite fortunate that I did not have a serious injury from that adjustment.

A few weeks went by and I was still feeling sick. I went to a chiropractor in the next town. He took an x-ray and I had a bad neck injury. Two discs were jammed together and the small little (I call it a q-tip bone) bone that rests between the discs was shoved forward and nerve had popped out of one end of that little bone. There was a curve at the top of my neck and rather than it curving into my body, it now curve like a backward ‘c’. None of this was good. I had to have chiropractic treatment for years after. It took 15 years for the curve in my neck to finally curve back toward my body.

To this day I have to be very careful. I get vertigo very easily. I have to be careful when being in a car if we are in a turn, I have to look straight, close my eyes, or follow the curve. When lying on my back and then to get up, I have to turn my head to the side before getting up.

I’ll always remember that ‘fun day’ on the rock slide. It was an injury for life. Oh well. Life goes on. My injury could have been far worse. It just happened to be one of those dumb luck accidents!