Mistakes on my birthday.
As with the majority of birthdays, they don’t end well.
Because like every other year, you’re favourite day has to come to an end and mine concluded abruptly.
Everyday we make mistakes.
Some smaller than others
Today I made a massive error.
Instead of taking a backpack to carry items I had bought from a shop, I decided to hang them from the handle bars of the bike.
Yep, stupid right.
In a split second, the bag got caught in the front wheel coming to an abrupt halt.
Myself and my body, on the other hand, continued catapulting forward.
Up and over the hangers.
All thanks to inertia.
Down like a ton of bricks, I landed awkwardly, scattering across the bitumen.
Skin left dotted across the roadway.
Instantly, I asked myself one straightforward question.
Why?
I knew why.
And if you’re reading this, you also know why.
It came to me just as fast as the event unfolded.
I’ll never do that again, period.
At the time, it was such an inconvenience and caused me nothing but negative grief, but looking back on it now, I’ve learnt so many thing because of it.
Countless things actually.
One of them being that when you remove the whole top layer of skin (the epidermis) down to the second layer of skin (the dermis), the best way to treat the wound is to clean the area, removing all dirt and contaminants, place a generous amount of antimicrobial dressing (nurses call it silver) and cover the area with a patch.
This allows the skin to not only come back at the edges and the surrounds of the laceration but also to come up effectively underneath, speeding up the recovery time.
Scabbing is a thing of the past, something I always believed was the right process of healing.
The second thing I learnt, is that sometimes you just need to let your body relax and recover.
By not letting your body fully recuperate, you put yourself back by not letting your physical and mental states a chance to refresh.
I was able to have a couple of days to slow down.
For now, that’s an event that will sit firmly in my memory.