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TIFU by breaking my leg, almost drowning in the sea and getting a girlfriend out of it!

Sorry for the format and this is going to be a long one, TLDR will be at the bottom. Getting a girlfriend out of it certainly isn’t a fuck up, it’s been great.

So to begin with, this happened on 27th May this year. It was a Thursday and I’d just gotten off work at 11.00am after finishing a 10 day trip, ready for a 300 mile drive home. Everything was going well this day, no hold ups with traffic etc. Around 2 hours before getting home I ring a friend of mine and see if he wants to head out on the Jetskis as soon as I get home, for those of you who don’t know what one is it’s like a motorbike but for water- fun! He agrees to meet me at the Clubhouse for around 5.30pm. So anyway I get home about 5pm and fling my suitcase in my room, say hello to my grandma briefly and then get my wetsuit, lifejacket boots etc… the only thing missing that night which would’ve made things a hell of a lot easier was my VHF Marine radio but I lost it that month in the sea… my bad. I get to the club meet my friend and his friend, and we load all 3 skis in to the water. We warm up in the little Bay Area and the water is a bit choppy at this point but manageable and we’re having fun jumping little waves. We head out to the main part of the sea and head to the beach and that’s when things start to get a bit crazy, there’s mad side winds and currents and we’re getting battered with spray so it was super cold at that point… we should of just turned back. We get to the beach and everything just unfolds, the sea is getting worse the waves are about a metre high and we’re jumping them and getting some good air time. I fall off and manage to get back on. My friends friend falls off his and we struggle to get it turned back up right, then it ends up washing up on the beach and the sea is digging it deeper and deeper, we’re like oh f**. Me and my friend decide we’ll go back to the club for the land rover and recover it that way. He heads off in front and he’s going at speed, I pick up the pace too to try tell him to stay close incase anything bad should happen. All of a sudden, this huge wave forms and I’m going too quick, I had no choice but to just go up it, I go seriously high and that’s when I’m thinking “ohhhhh st”. I land the ski flat and I may as well of landed it on concrete, the amount of force that went through my leg caused it to just explode. As a result I tip off side ways into the water and that’s when I begin to let out the most intense screams, shouting “my fing legggg!”. The waves are still huge at this point and breaking over the top of me and bending my leg even more, making the pain more and more excruciating. If I’d of blacked out at this point I would of just drowned. My friend is no where to be seen and he finally finds me about 5 minutes later, he goes white as a ghost from the shock and then starts flinging a rope to me to try tow me but it’s making the pain worse. I tell him to leave for the shore and go get help, so he does exactly that. I figure my best option is to point my toes towards the waves, so that way it’s not bending my leg so much and it’s also pushing me. These waves keep breaking over me and submerging me so I repeatedly keep holding my nose to stop the water etc. This goes on for some time before I hear a load of voices and suddenly I wash up close to the beach, where there is a load of sea swimmers and 1 surfer. The surfer gives the board to the swimmers and they plonk me on to the board and get me out of the water and hold my leg to stop it flopping. We get out of the water and the coastguard take over and put me in the back of a pickup and take me up to the top of the beach where an ambulance is waiting. I get into the ambulance and they cut all my gear off and then give me a little bit of Morphine and a green whistle pain relief thing, then put a vacuum splint on to help my leg. They take me to hospital and I get X-Rays, this is where I come to learn it’s a really bad tibia and fibula fracture. Doctors keep surrounding me and decide it’s too severe for them so transfer me to the next hospital 20 minutes away, this is at like 1.30am. I get to hospital and get doped up for the night on meds. The same day I go for surgery number 1 and they fix a stabilising frame to the outside of my leg, it’s a load of rods fixed together in a 90° formation and drilled into my foot, heel and upper leg. Day 7 I go for my main surgery, they remove the frame, remove previous metal work from an old ankle brake and then fit an Intramedullary Nail into my tibia and 4 screws, for those who don’t know what it is it’s a titanium rod down the centre of my tibia. I see on Facebook a post about the accident from the swimmers and say thanks for the help, and get speaking to one of the girls from the group who helped me. We get on great and it’s brilliant company for the 11 days I’m in hospital. I get discharged on day 11 and go home with a bag full of meds etc, and then she comes round the day after and looks after me and we just click, it’s amazing. I’m still with her to this day and I’m walking well, back to working as normal and we’ve done many amazing things together! See my other post on my profile for a lovely X-ray of my leg.

TLDR; broke my tib/fib on a jetski, almost drowned, washed ashore and met an amazing girl who was swimming in the sea at the time and is now my girlfriend.

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