Accidents will happen

A few weeks ago a Facebook friend (whom I have actually met in real life) posted about a skiing accident he’d had. His first in over thirty years of skiing.

It was followed by a comment from another friend that I found really interesting. She said (as well as being sorry about his injury), “like you, I’m not normally accident-prone… there’s that awful moment when you realise it’s all gone horribly wrong and you think… ‘errr, this isn’t meant to happen to me!!’ A blow to the ego as well as everything else!”

Now there are several reasons why I have never gone skiing. The first is that I hate snow. That’s a bit harsh. I dislike it a lot. I hate being cold and wet and that seems to be an inevitable consequence of skiing.

Another is that as leisure activities go it appears to be really fucking expensive. In order to stop you being cold and wet you have to fork out on hideously priced specialist garments that do things like ‘wicking’ and other rather unpleasant sounding activities. And of course all the stuff that actually enables you to ski.

But the main reason is that I know my limitations.

I am rather accident prone. I say as much on my website, so it must be true. Not accident prone in the sense of being the kind of person that car insurance companies love. I have a great no claims discount. And not really a butter fingers type hosting dinner parties with quaintly mis-matched plates and jam jar glasses. And not like my other half who seems to be able to stub his toe on almost anything with a diameter of at least 1cm, or walk into walls that have always been there.

No, I am more your personal injury accident prone person. Since I was a kid I have always been, shall we say, wobbly. When I was little I fell over so much that my step brothers thought I was doing it deliberately for attention. Other kids would be running round the playground in a game of kiss-chase and I’d be holed up with the school secretary getting my sprained ankle bandaged.

Technically it seems to be something I’ve inherited from my mum that’s called hypermobility. I’ve never been officially diagnosed, but I have enough of the symptoms. Basically, for me, it means I have rubbish knees and ankles and wrists and things.

So skiing – despite many people’s insistence to me that it is simply the best, most fun thing in the world ever – is just not practical because either I would be crippled after one day with knees that could not take the strain of standing in that I’m-pooing-outdoors pose for hours, or I would literally be crippled in the hospital (I imagine) bandaged like one of those comedy ‘Only When I Laugh’ men with a leg suspended from the ceiling.

In recent years I have; broken my ankle crossing my bedroom floor, re-broken it negotiating a small hole in the road, broken five bones in my foot in a really unusual way (according to Drs) slipping down about three stairs, dislocated my elbow on the first day of a holiday in the USA whilst six months pregnant (another really unusual injury mostly seen in sports people – oh how we laughed), and broken a rib leaving an ice rink after a really un-fun and ill-advised half hour forcing my petrified daughter to make the most of attempting to learn to skate.

And those are just the fractures. I do injure myself less severely on a semi regular basis.

But because I do, and because I have done for as long as I can remember, it really is no surprise to me.

Unlike my non accident prone friends, I never think ‘this shouldn’t be happening to me’, I’m just vaguely resigned to the fact that, yet again, it has. And it’s not much of a blow to the ego either. Yes it can be slightly embarrassing explaining the invariably ridiculous way I achieved the injury. But people love war stories, and I like to make people laugh, so, you know, it’s all good. Sort of.

So this woman’s comment sent me scurrying to Google ‘the psychology of accidents’. I was interested to know how people felt after their accident and whether this ‘it shouldn’t happen to me’ feeling had a detrimental effect on their recovery, or their confidence, and whether being accident prone made those people perhaps generally more cheerful about their injury.

Unfortunately all I could find were studies that attempted to ascertain whether there was a recognisable mental characteristic in people who tended to have accidents. Was I – as my step brothers suspected – making it happen? Or was I one of those reckless types who wakes up on a Saturday morning and thinks ‘I know, I’m going to try le parkour today!’ and therefore often winds up with a spectacular street-railing piercing somewhere.

I’m not. In case you were wondering.

So I couldn’t find a study about whether people who rarely had accidents therefore felt more aggrieved when they did, or whether the more accident friendly among us had a more shoulder shruggy ‘oh well, there we go, let’s get on with it then’ approach to hobbling on with life more or less mentally unscathed.

Perhaps someone should study it. And then you can let me know the answer. I’ll be the one over there with the robot foot and the shoulder sling. Probably.