How an accident reminded me that I’m mortal.

I was an adventurous and carefree child. I remember once — I must have been about seven years old — walking across a meadow and thinking, “Life is so great after all. I don’t understand how anyone can worry at all.

I had many good friends, was very good at sports and at school learning was easy. I thought it would always be that simple.

But then came the day when I had to learn that the world is a dangerous place and everything you do has consequences.

I was visiting my grandmother’s house with my parents. There was also an uncle and an aunt. They had brought my little cousin, who was a few years younger than me. We went outside to play.

At that time one of my favorite activities was climbing trees. I had no fear of heights at all and was utterly fearless. For me, it was nothing special to climb up to the top like a monkey and then do a handstand in a branch fork.

Also on this day, I wanted to climb again. I ran with my little cousin to a tree, only a few meters away from my grandmother’s house, and climbed up immediately. My cousin was still too small for that, so he stopped and watched me stunned as I rose higher and higher.

The world was my playground, and I was invulnerable.

A rotten branch and a fall into the deep

Then I stood on a branch that was about as thick as the arm of a grown man. A little further in front of me, at about eye level, I saw another branch that was as thick as the one I was standing on.

I’m Tarzan, I must have thought because, without hesitation, I just jumped off. I wanted to jump off my branch and hang on to the other with my hands. I had done that many times before, and it had always gone well.

But not that day. I still have pictures that have burned into my head, but they are chaotic and like a time-lapse movie. It is often reported that time seems to stand still when one experiences an unfortunate accident. It was different with me. Suddenly I no longer saw the branch I had been aiming at, but a tangle of twigs and leaves that turned around me as if I was being thrown around in a washing machine.

Then I hit the floor.

Adrenaline must be a hell of a thing because I remember jumping up and staring at my left arm in complete bewilderment. It hung on me like something dead. It was bent like a twig, and from the crook of the arm a bone stood out white and shining. I was bleeding.

It took maybe a second, perhaps a whole minute, until my shock stiffness was released. And then I screamed like crazy and ran off. My little cousin had already run away screaming and crying, but I think I even overtook him on the way back to my grandma’s house.

I can still see the faces of my parents, grandma, uncle, and aunt, as I roared into the kitchen where everyone was sitting and drinking coffee. The sight must have been terrible. I can hardly imagine how I would react if a child with a completely smashed arm came up to me today. I’d probably faint.

But my uncle kept his nerve. He grabbed me, carried me into his car and drove me to the emergency room of the hospital, which fortunately was only one street away.

I remember screaming all the time. I remember the worst pain you can imagine and also the fact that I was absurdly heartbroken when the doctors had to cut my favorite shirt off my body in the surgery room. And I remember waiting.

It was a holiday, and there was no surgeon or anesthesiologist. They had to be called at home first to make them come. And I lay there on the table, begging for the pain to stop and seeing my mother crying, which only made things worse.

The greatest salvation I have ever experienced was the moment when the anaesthesiologist was finally there and gave me the syringe.

How it really happened

Turns out there was someone who had been watching me fall. A neighbor of my grandmother had just looked out of the window and seen me fall. He reported that I missed my little cousin by a hair’s breadth.

The thought that I could have fallen on his head gave me nightmares afterward. Also, the neighbor described that I had fallen upside down from a height of about four meters. He thought I wouldn’t survive because it looked to him like I hit my head on the ground. But a reflex must have caused me to stretch my arm forward to catch the fall. If that reflex hadn’t worked, I’d have broken my neck instead of my arm.

The injuries were still devastating. My elbow had been shattered into many small fragments, another bone had pierced my crook of the arm and caused an open fracture. My wrist was also broken, but I felt nothing of it because the pain of the severe fracture outshone everything else.

My elbow was reattached with stagnant nails, and I wore a cast for several weeks. But the horror continued when the cast was removed. The two pointed nails had to be pulled under local anesthesia. My father came to see me and almost passed out.

About a week later I had my stitches removed — without anesthesia. They had grown together with a thick crust, and the procedure became a painful massacre.

Then physiotherapy for weeks and every single session consisted of pain. The therapist said that I had been lucky because if the growth joint had been destroyed, I would have kept the arm of an eleven-year-old forever (my wife always laughs a lot at this idea — I love her for her unique humor 😉).

In short, it was hell for me. And after that, I was a different person.

How the accident changed me

I never climbed a tree again. Suddenly I was afraid of heights, but that wasn’t all. After this accident, I was scared of everything. My essential trust in the world had disappeared. I had understood that everything could change from one second to the next and that you had to be extremely careful not to put yourself in danger.

For a while, it looked as if my bad experience would paralyze me forever, but I was lucky that I was still a child, because children forget quickly. Of course, I have never forgotten the accident, and also the memory of the pain is still present in my head today. But I’ve lost the general fear of life again.

Luckily for me, I was addicted to exercise. I just couldn’t be without sports, so I went swimming again, I started playing volleyball and doing track and field. My arm healed again, and all that still reminds me of this unfortunate day today is a rather ugly scar, about fifteen centimeters long, that runs over my elbow.

But the fear has not disappeared. It has only shifted to other areas of my life and over the years has turned into caution.

More than anything else, this fall probably contributed to transforming me from a daredevil into an analytical person. When I start something new today, I have thought about it carefully and weighed all the risks and opportunities against each other.

Does that make me less spontaneous? Probably. But if my carelessness hadn’t almost killed me back then, it probably would have done so sometime later in life.

In the end, the crash was one of the turning points in life that in retrospect made me the person I am today. Could I have done without this experience? I don’t think so, because I love being who I am.

If you have also had such experiences, I would be pleased if you would tell me about it. I keep noticing that it’s good to write things off your soul.

Everybody have a good day!

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