It's a souvenir in the shape of switzerland

I don't think I've ever actually blogged my most recent injury. It's really quite the thrilling tale.

So this summer I went to Switzerland to hike the Alps (best experience of my life) and we met up with some old friends that live just outside of Basel. We toured the city one day and ended up at this restaurant with a ton of ads on the paper place mats. After looking at mine I point to an ad and tell my dad, "We're going here, okay?" And he was like, "Sure, we can go tomorrow." The ad I pointed to was for this Forest Jump place which is this gigantic high ropes course.

http://www.forestjump.ch/

The moms and my sister decided to go to this old castle and do some geocaching around the area while the dads, Sara, Laura, and I took the train out of the city to go do some climbing. The place was so much bigger than I could imagine. There were 7 or 8 different courses ranging from easy to extremely difficult. Of course we decided to go on the extremely difficult one our second time around after dong a medium one for warm up. The difficult one consisted of all of the elements of a high ropes course: cargo net traverse about 10m off the ground, wire traverse, rope traverse (the one where you're just hanging by your hands and you have to monkey over to the other side), swinging log traverse (at this point we saw a guy cry and have to be helped down by the workers >_< ), and of course the zip lines. We got all the way through that one and then moved onto one that was basically all zip lines just for the fun of it (it was also the highest course, the highest part being about 20m up).

We were about 3/4 through the course when it happened. I hooked myself into the longest of the lines and sped through the trees. I started twisting around and I couldn't twist back in time. I finally straightened myself out but it was too late. I should have been slowing down at that point but I was still going full speed. My legs swung around and smashed into the platform at about 20 mph. My left leg got the full impact of it, the right got nothing. I was in so much pain but I didn't even cry. I could barely unhook myself from the lines because I couldn't stand up. I sat on the platform and used my right leg to push myself to reach the cables.

In 30 seconds the area of impact on my shin was swollen an inch high and about 4 inches in diameter. A few minutes later it looked like I had another knee it was so massive. Then it turned the usual pretty colors: red, purple, blue, green, yellow. A whole rainbow of internal bleeding (such a pleasant thought, right?). Anyway, I managed to finish the rest of the course using only my right leg and arms... It was really strange actually.

When we got back to the house I iced it a ton but the swelling didn't go down at all. It was filled with so much fluid. (I didn't even scratch it at all, only direct impact). I also had pretty extensive nerve damage where I hit it. My dad said the nerve damage would go away with the swelling. He was wrong. It's been 6 months; the swelling went down a month ago but the nerve damage is still there. There is also a dent in my shin that is about 1/2 cm deep. It's really weird not being able to feel it.