NSA Student Injuries
By Tirzah Hopkins
Injuries are a part of life. Everyone knows this. But not all injuries are the same, so NSA students were asked what their injuries were.
(The injuries will not be gone into with detail for the sake of our sensitive viewers - however, if you’re interested in how the students themselves told it, you can see that here.)
But here’s the summary. Of the sixteen students who reported injuries, the biggest category was finger/toe injuries. There were ten of those. There were six arm/hand breaks, three head injuries, two instances of deep cuts or really bad scrapes (road rash), two collar bone breakings, one instance of broken teeth, and one fractured tailbone.
Some of the injuries, while extremely painful sounding, are also humorous. Alexis Tuyo says that she has run into many poles. Another student somehow sprained his toe doing a karate kick, while student Joshua O’Halloran’s toe exploded while he was running in flipflops. He said that “if the police investigate our deck and use the little black light thingy, they can conclude that someone probably got murdered there because of the amount of blood xD”.
But the worst injury on the list is probably the fractured tailbone. Tailbone injuries take years to get over. I bruised my tailbone about six years ago, and it still hurts me if I sit a certain way. I can’t imagine a fractured tailbone.
But how can we avoid injuries? Honestly, you can’t. But despite what many parents probably think, should you? If you don’t get injured, it’s proof that you aren’t pushing the limits, being active, and having fun, doing the things that help immensely with physical and mental development, and helps us grow character. A lot of the injuries mentioned happened on the playground, but also on trampolines, climbing trees, riding horses, and hoverboarding (to be fair, a couple happened because the student fell out of bed - but that was a minority). Thanks to modern medicine, injuries aren’t as horrible and life-threatening as they used to be. We can do crazy things and hope to come through alive and hopefully little worse for wear. Now, this doesn’t mean you should go do crazy things without proper equipment or training - just don’t hold yourself back because you’re afraid of getting hurt. Listen to the stories of your favorite athletes, daredevils, and adventurers, and you will hear about a lot of injuries, I can promise you. But they didn’t fear the pain or let it hold them back, and that’s something we can all learn from.
Tirzah Hopkins has been at NSA for about two years. She lives in Indiana, USA with eight of her eleven siblings and mom and dad. She has recently started writing for the Navigator. She enjoys spending time with family, hiking, karate, writing, and playing with babies.