totallytinab

Many of you know the story of how I went on vacation and came home with a broken neck, but for those of you who do not…

A friend from my LPGA days has a time-share and invited me and two others for a week of  relaxation, fun and sun in Mexico.  We were in Nuevo Vallarta at a really nice resort and having a great time.  I was working out each morning and then spending the rest of the day trying to even out my tan lines at the pool.  The weather was beautiful as was the pool with its swim up bar, its lazy river, and its big slide.  It was fun to reconnect with old friends and there were laughs all around.  Wednesday, January 12th was a pretty normal day.  We decided that we would stay in that night and just order pizza and drink some of the beer and wine in our hotel room refrigerator.  Just before leaving the pool, we decided to play in a ping-pong tournament.  I was the 3rd of 4 eliminated and saw my other 2 friends swimming in the pool.  So I decided to join them for one last dip before going back to the room.  I dove into the shallow water and hit my head. Looking back I don’t remember what I was thinking. I replay that dive over and over.  I was just being a little goofy and going to join my friends in the pool.  I do remember hitting my head, but came up from the water right away.  The friend that was not swimming told me to get out of the pool because my head was bleeding.  My friends called the hotel doctor and tried to stop the bleeding.  I ran through a whole range of emotions.  I was upset that I was hurt.  I was scared being in another country.  My head was starting to hurt.  My neck was starting to hurt.  And I was embarrassed that I had done this.  I was given 7 stitches in the top of my head and then taken to a hospital for x-rays. The x-rays were negative.  The doctors gave me a neck brace and some medication.  They told me to try to move my head as much as I could to try to loosen what we thought was maybe really tight muscles or at worse a whip-lash.  I spoke to my husband and he urged me to come home.  I was in such pain that I really didn’t think I could fly home yet.  I thought that by Saturday when we were due to fly home, the pain would be less severe. So I spent the rest of my vacation laying in bed watching movies in Spanish and being barely able to move. We did end up changing my flight home so that I would be flying with one of my friends. She was a great help as I made my way through the airport in a wheelchair. The flight home was really tough but after 3 of the longest hours of my life I was home.