TMI Thursday: The time I had my legs, and heart, broken

In the winter of 2007 I broke both my legs skiing, suffered internal bleeding, tissue swelling, potential organ failure and almost died from my injuries.

It was the single most intensely painful experience of my life ... Then I had my heart broken.


This is me after surgery. Not my best look ...

But let me back up. I was a sophomore at Saint Martin's University, playing soccer, dating a girl whom I thought I loved and having a grand ole' time.

Christmas break came and I decided to go on a skiing trip in Oregon.

Because I was pretty ripped and fit from a season of playing goal keeper I figured I was pretty much invincible and could handle anything the mountain could throw at me. On the second day I tried to do a flip and ended up bashing the back of my head on a rock and knocking myself out for a few minutes. This should have been my first clue to slow down ...

But I didn't. And the next day, on the final run of the final day, I decided to go big or go home.

I got off the lift and took the hardest run at break-neck speed. I found a line through the trees and bombed it.


I picked up so much speed that when I shot out of the treeline I hit the first mogul and went air born ... gaining about seven feet of air before coming down hard on another mogul about 15 feet down the run.

I landed at the apex of that mogul and almost face planted. I knew that if I fell at this speed I would really hurt myself so I battled the mountain, wrenching my body this way and that, trying in vain to cut my speed and gain control. I was heaving my body left and right with such force that it felt like my hips were going to pop out of their sockets.

I wasn't slowing down. I was getting desperate. I could feel my muscles losing the strength it would take to stop me so I put in one last-ditch effort to stop and torqued my entire frame to the left, in an attempt to cut across the face and burn off some speed.

It didn't work. As I jerked my body left I heard a deep, wet crack and felt my left leg crumple.

It sounded like a carnival strongman had taken a 2X4 soaked in water and broken it over his knee.

I was three-quarters of the way down the mountain and the last thing I remember was my face smashing into the iced-over apex of another mogul, then ... nothing.

I awoke at the bottom of the run, looking at the sky, on the edge of a run-merger lane – skiers and riders blasting past. It was then that I felt the most intense pain of my life. I could tell my left femur was shattered and felt the shards of fragmented bone were piercing the muscle tissue of my quads and thigh.

I looked down. My left ski was still attached but my toes and knee were pointing down into the snow, the heel pointing up toward the clouds. Screaming in pain and with great effort I sat up and removed the ski. Like a corkscrew the leg began to right itself, twisting back to roughly where it should be.

I watched in horror as my foot made a 45 to 50 degree turn so that my toes were once again pointing upward.

Because of a storm I couldn't get an airlift and it was almost two hours before the ambulance arrived. I was taken to the nearest hospital and went into surgery immediately. Three blood transfusions and hours of surgery later I woke up with a plate and screws keeping my left femur together.


This is a picture of the hardware after it broke a few months later, leading to another surgery.

But that night I woke up in the ICU and all I wanted to do was talk to my girlfriend. And whadda know? She wanted to talk to me, too!

Amid the haze of morphine I remember calling her and asking her to come visit me in the hospital. I missed her and I was in a lot of pain.

She said that she couldn't come see me because she'd never driven across the Cascade Mountain passes in the winter and she was too afraid to fly in one of "those little planes."

Then she said her mom thought we should break up. Now I should mention that her mom disliked me intensely and, in my experience, if a girl's friends and/or mother don't like you it doesn't matter if your Gandhi – you're pretty much screwed.

She said that I wouldn't be back that year (something I was in denial over) and then she said it would probably be a good idea for us to see other people. Yeah – see other people!

I told her the only other people I would be seeing were the nurses who came to change my IV.

Now, at this point my impulse control was considerably hampered by the constant intravenous flow of Dilaudid.

I lost it.

I told her I would have never done that to her and in so many words that her mom could go to a very hot place for a very long time ... I told her to never speak to me, that she was dead to me, and that was that.

It took a long time to get over the emotional pain. It took longer to get over the physical pain but the entire experience was one that forced me to grow stronger.

It's an experience that I never wish to repeat but one that I am grateful for all the same. You don't really know how strong you are until you've been tested by something that almost breaks you.