When I fell off my bike, my knee wasn’t the only casualty. As I lay in the ambulance and listened to the sirens above, my worry moved from the pain in my leg to whether I’d lost anything during the fall. I saw I was missing a shoe, but the nurse assured me that it was with my backpack on the floor. I then checked my pockets in search of my wallet, keys, and phone.

The latter seemed to have fared pretty well, despite my refusal to ever use a protective case. The glass of its front and the back was fully intact. I thought that it’d made it through unscathed, until I noticed that half of one of the camera lenses was missing. Shit.

Later, as I sat awaiting the results of my x-ray, I began to nervously pick out the last tiny shards of glass from the broken lens until the whole camera module was exposed. I then checked which of the three cameras on my phone has broken and discovered that it was the 0.5x zoom lens.

My first instinct was to look to buy a new phone. For a while I’d been secretly waiting for an excuse to retire my iPhone 12, and this seemed like the perfect one. During the next few days at home, I busied myself looking at options, from refurbished iPhones to Androids.

But then I started taking photos with the broken camera. I discovered that the photos would come back blurry, way too high in contrast, and with an odd perspective. As I hobbled around in pain and on my crutches, the photos I took were dizzy and disorientated—just as I was. It all seemed very fitting, so I never did change phones.

These are some of the photos from that time.

This title of this post, ‘Mareo’, is a Spanish word meaning dizziness or vertigo. I think it sums up my experience well.

Cycling home from work, the car in front of me began to brake, and so I did too… nothing out of the ordinary. But the brake on this bike was faulty and seized up without warning, leaving me zigzagging down the road as I struggled to regain control. In the end I couldn’t and so the bike fell to the ground.

The rest is a bit of a blur. I screamed out, a group of passers-by moved me to the curb, the police showed up, and then the ambulance arrived. The initial diagnosis was that it was just a sprain, so I hopped my way into the ambulance and off we went, sirens blaring, to the hospital. There I was told that I’d actually managed to smash the bone into pieces, and so I was admitted for the night and told that I’d have to have my leg operated on. Whilst the painkillers kicked in, I stared at the ceiling trying to calm my panic and force myself to sleep.

Thus begun the first month of what would become almost half a year of recovery. As soon as my mum found out that I’d be having an operation, she booked a flight over and wound up staying for over a month. Her company was vital as I adjusted to my new reality, both physically as she helped me undertake the most basic tasks, and mentally as we chatted the days away.

The operation was three-hour long affair in which they rebuilt the bone just below my knee with plates and screws aplenty. Apart from the nausea caused by the metal stitches in my leg and the intravenous drip in the back of my hand, the worst part of the process had to be the pain and subsequent lack of sleep during those first few days after the operation. 

Despite spending the next few weeks tired, pained, and bored out of my mind, I was optimistic. As well as my mum’s company, my friends stopped by frequently and my bedroom becoming the hottest new place to hang for Pedro, Sara, Rhea, Julia, and many more. I began to appreciate the small things I’d usually take for granted, and started tracking my progress through the tiniest achievements and milestones: the road to recovery became almost a game.

There’s so much more I could talk about and so much more detail to give, but I’ll leave it here for now. These were a couple of the most testing months of my life, but I managed to scrape through thanks in no small part to the love and support from friends and family — especially my mum.

I love you all very much.