A Broken Leg
There is a cliché used by man that says “time waits for no man” which infers that time is always moving. Regardless of what you do time does not stop nor slow down. We often forget that time is not standing still although we may be standing still and want time to stop. Time is a very potent part of one’s life. We experience moments all the time where time is irrelevant for a moment before it is immediately made relevant. For example, L.A. Paul in his journal entry “Temporal Experience” says he stepped outside to a nice breeze cooling his face and then realizes time is passing once the breeze dies down—he needs to begin walking before he is late for class.
Personally, my own temporal experience involved an injury I sustained in preseason camp for football. Everybody that was watching the play where I was injured felt as if everything happened so fast. For me however, the sequence leading up to the injury unfolded in slow motion and time felt as if it was not moving at all after the actual injury. On the third day of preseason camp, August 9th, 2012, I was given the ball on a run play. As soon as I received the ball and proceeded towards the defense, everything around me seemed to slow down and so did I. I could feel the hot summer air coming through my helmet and hitting my face. Every defender I ran by began to feel as if they were moving much slower now. There was only one defender left and I changed directions in order to avoid him. Immediately I felt time speed up again. He grabbed me by my shoulder pads and proceeded to twist my body. Next, I heard a loud pop and snap which rendered me lying on my in pain yelling and swearing. I felt my leg buckle and I hit the ground. As I took a look at my leg it was evident that it was broken. The only thing I could do was sit there and stare at my leg. There was no sound only a terrible site. The event that had just unraveled was so surreal and shocking that time stood still for a while. The blissful moment was interrupted when the trainers reached me and forced me to sit still so that they could evaluate the injury.
The ambulance was then called to come and transport me to the hospital. The wait lasted for an hour in a half on their arrival. At least that what the wait felt like to me. The pain caused the time I spent waiting to feel much longer than it actually was. In reality the ambulance arrived in fifteen minutes to take me to the hospital. The ride to the hospital was said to take thirty minutes which I figured would be an extremely long time. However due to the morphine that was given to me, the ride only took about five minutes. Upon arriving at the hospital, I was placed in a room to have x-rays and be evaluated. I was told by Molly, our trainer, that it took forty-five minutes for the doctor to come take a look at my knee. Of course to me it felt like a much longer time due to the excruciating pain I was feeling from my leg. Then I was told that due to the extent of my injury, I would need surgery to repair the damage. Hearing those words caused my mind to slow down, my thought process stalled, and everything around me stopped as I tried to comprehend me having season ending surgery.
They moved me upstairs so that I could undergo immediate surgery. When I made it upstairs, there was a delay and I had to wait for an operating room to become available and prepped. By this time, I remember asking what the time was and I was told 5:45 p.m. The nurse came in ten minutes later and said that she was about to give me some pain medicine. Little did I know I was being sedated for surgery. I woke up five hours later in a hospital bed and what seemed like a five minute nap was actually a five hour sedation. I was in the hospital for almost a week and I completely lost track of days. Each day I would wake up around ten a.m. to a phone call from the cafeteria requesting to know what I wanted for breakfast. The amount of drugs I was being given caused me to sleep majority of the day away making the days go by faster each day. While I was in the hospital I was never truly aware as to what day it truly was. Before I knew it, I was five days out of surgery and being released.
Finally, I was able to begin to recall the days and know the time of day. However, I was released and admitted once again to the hospital. The pain became unbearable when I was released and I was anxious to get back to the hospital to get pain relief which seemed to take hours upon hours. The amount of time I spent in the hospital was thought to be about three weeks in my mind. The actual time spent was only about eight days total but it felt as though time moved slower when I was in pain and faster when there was no pain.