I ended up watching the game with a few of the lads and my friend Jo. After the game I got to chatting with her and she suddenly drops the bombshell of the evening (like I said the game was fairly predictable). Basically, she says, our friend, my old flatmate, C, had broken his back last week after falling off a balcony while drunk, and the last thing she heard was that there was a fairly high chance that he wouldn't be able to walk again.
Damn.
Now the history here is that C, being South African, is a bit of a, how do you say ... a nutter. He's a slight piss head and occasionally he does dumb drunken things, but overall, like all of my friends, he's alright. In fact I recall him breaking an elbow once when he convinced everyone he was a master of the skateboard - he does that sort of stupid thing. That said, I'm still completely in shock.
The one thing that I fear more than death is a life being incapacitated in some form or another and maybe being confined to a wheelchair. I enjoy my freedom, I enjoy my travel, my outdoor activities, my simple ability to get up the four steps to my flat in a single bound. Its hard to conceptualise that being taken away all because of a dumb drunken incident by myself or someone else. Its made me stop and think.
Sometimes if nothing seriously bad happens to me for a while I get this sense of indestructibility and I take risks. If there is one positive thing to be taken out of this its that moments like these help ground me and remind me how quickly things can change. I am now aware of my own mortality again.
So there's been a few texts back and forwards between South Africa and England in the past couple of days. Good news is he's out of hospital and he can walk (kinda) although he is confined to a brace for the next couple of months. That being said, that's great news, and I'm sure he's thinking exactly the same thing.
C mate, I hope you get better and you make a full recovery, and piece of advice - don't do that again.
1 comment:
Blimey.
Post a Comment