Creak. My gymnastics bar at home makes sounds as I practice on it in my basement. I’m trying to work on a new skill I learned at practice the other day (I was learning a back hip circle which is going backwards around the bar) when all of a sudden… CRACK! I feel a pop in my shoulder as my body hits the ground. I feel a sharp, stinging pain in my shoulder…

Finally, when I get over my pain enough, I yell for my mom. “Mom!” I yell, “I hurt my shoulder!” My mom comes sprinting down the stairs to find me laying on the floor under my gymnastics bar sprawled out on the black mat that I keep under the bar. My shoulder feels as if it had just been stabbed 20 times with a sharp knife. I try not to think about it. You’re okay, I think to myself, everything is going to be okay. My mom lifts up my shoulder “AHHH!”I scream. The pain in my shoulder is the worst pain I’ve felt in my life. Once my mom finishes assessing my shoulder, she decides that we should go to the emergency room because she thinks my collarbone is broken.

The car ride is long and painful. My shoulder will not stop hurting. I just wish the pain would go away. It takes all of my self-control not to scream, freak out, and panic. You’re okay, I keep reminding myself, everything is going to be okay. Just a little longer. We finally get to the emergency room and wait for what feels like forever for a doctor to come in and tell us that we need to get an x-ray on my shoulder. The 40 minutes I waited feels more like 40 hours of waiting. They make me put on this ugly, blue gown that only ties in two places on the back so you can see almost my whole backside. The ties don’t help cover much. I have to go into this big room and they use something that looks like a huge camera to take the x-ray of my shoulder. Once they finish, I go back to my room and wait for the results.

“Hi Kaci,” the doctor starts, “It looks like you have broken your collarbone.” My mom was right. It was broken. “Do you play any sports?” He asks.

“Yes,” I answered, “Gymnastics.” 

“You are going to have to be out of it while your shoulder heals,” he tells me. 

No. No. No. Those words hurt almost more than my collarbone breaking. Gymnastics was my life. It was the thing I enjoyed most. It was how I spent my free time. What am I supposed to do without gymnastics? I start to cry. 

“What’s wrong?” My mom asks.

“I really want to keep doing gymnastics,” I explained to her. 

“Just because you can’t do gymnastics now doesn’t mean that you can’t ever do gymnastics again,” she tells me, “You just have to heal your shoulder so you can enjoy doing gymnastics again without pain.”

“What am I supposed to do for fun when I can’t do gymnastics?” I ask. 

“You could hang out with me,” she laughs. I smile. That makes me feel better. I know that I’ll be okay and once my shoulder heals I’ll be back doing gymnastics again. Through this I learned to be more careful, but also determination will help you get back and be stronger. The next season after I broke my collarbone, I tied for first place on bars 2 times because of all the hard work I put into getting better and working on my skills.