Last summer, I spent a little differently than I would most years. Usually, I’m outside, running around and doing sports and activities I loved to do. That all changed on July 15 when I learned a very valuable lesson.

It started out as a normal morning for me: outside, golfing a round of eighteen, then going home and going out fishing for a while. When I was done fishing, I decided to ride my 4-wheeler around and check out the fields for animals. I rode out into a big field of grass and just having a good time. I thought that I would try and make a new path by making a large looping path, which I drove over a couple times. The last time I went down that path, I drifted, very elegantly, off to the side and went a little bit off of the path. That’s when I hit the washout in the field that changed my summer.

Instantly, I was thrown off of the four-wheeler. There was a loud “crack,” and everything went black. Slowly, as I began to regain consciousness, still unable to see, the faint, dull “roar” of the four-wheeler’s engine purred next to me. As my vision began to return, I saw the rim of the front tire of the four-wheeler inches from my face. After lying there for a few minutes, I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move my left arm. A sharp pain on my left side, almost unbearable, ached tremendously. Finally, I stood up and sat back on the four-wheeler, unable to use my left arm.

The ride back to my house was one of the longest and most painful rides of my life. I had to go through two miles through wild grass fields. While on the ride back home, I had to drive over large bumps and huge creeks and through ditches.

After about fifteen minutes of excruciating driving, I arrived home and was able to sit down. As I walked over to sit down on the couch, my brother asked me, “Why are you holding your arm so weird?” Almost instantly, his face turned to a pale white when he saw what I had done. My mom heard all of the commotion and walked in. Her face looked the exact same. She did what she could for me, which was grab some ice to put on it, but she had kids she was babysitting that day and wasn’t able to leave right away. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go to the doctor in the next hour. All I wanted to do was go and find out what exactly was hurt on my left side.

Our family went to the hospital and checked in. The entire time I was sitting there I thought how much this was going to change my summer. We walked into the doctor’s office and he took me to take some x-rays. After about five minutes, the doctor walked in to the office, with a troubling look on his face. “It appears as though you broke both the radius and the ulna in your arm, and your ulna is broken horizontally and vertically,” the doctor told us. This shattered my entire summer. While I was sitting and thinking of what had happened, the doctors came in and said they wanted to clean out all of my burns and scrapes. The pain was excruciating, and the doctor kept ruthlessly scrubbing at the wound. They finally cleaned it out completely and found that there were some splinters in my arm. They pulled out four splinters that were all a half an inch long. The doctor said, “All right. I’ve had enough fun torturing you.” We all laughed and she left. After about fifteen more minutes, the doctors came into the room again with more news. It appeared to them that I had also fractured my shoulder. After I arrived home, I thought, “If that 4-wheeler would have been another foot closer to me, I wouldn’t be here any longer.” With that in mind, I realized that helmets must be a requirement on any type of motorized vehicle. Helmets may not seem like much, but that can be the difference between life and death.