Yet another impact on the injured knee!

Last Thursday, I took a day off. As the weather was good I decided to take my kids and my mom to Apeldoorn in the Netherlands. We wanted to visit the theme park and spend the day there. My mom is here with us in Germany to visit us and to take care of the kids during their summer vacation. Apeldoorn is a 2-hour drive from where we live. As usual, we did not manage to start early and ended up reaching our destination around 12:00. By this time, the park was already crowded. Thinking that my mom could not walk for extended periods in the park, I reserved a battery operated wheel chain the day before - only to realise later that it was a big mistake!

I reached the entrance, paid the entry, went and took possession of the battery operated wheelchair. To me it was simple to operate as explained by the service personnel at the park. My mom nodded her head as though she understood everything! She sat on it, drove for about 50 meters after which my elder daughter wanted to use the rest room. So I ordered my mom to park the wheelchair in a corner so that it does not hinder the pedestrians and other visitors to the park. She agreed to what I said and started to come towards one corner. I was standing with my younger daughter in my arms and while my mom was navigating the wheelchair to the corner, my elder daughter was trying to help her give directions on how to steer and corner. This somehow confused my mom, she gave full throttle and guess what, she whacked on my leg.

As I was standing sideways with my left side of my body facing the oncoming wheelchair, my mom was dashing against my left leg, I started to scream with pain and told her to stop which panicked her even further, she instead of taking her hands off the accelerator, she accelerated even further and gave couple more strikes with the wheelchair - the impact being taken by my already injured left leg. Since I do not have my ACL, my left leg would easily bend against this impact and this caused immense pain. Luckily for me the wheelchair came to a stop by dashing against an elevated floor, if not I had been probably fatally injured! All this while my younger daughter was in my arms. All this happened within a couple of seconds!

The impact of this freaky accident meant that I had to use my crutches for the next couple of days and also use a knee bandage like this one here to stabilise my knee. Subsequently, the pain kind of went away after a couple of days, but I missed out on those bike rides that I have originally planned! I will henceforth be extra cautious when out in such situations.

So after all this drama at the park, it was me who was using the wheelchair at the park and my mom was walking comfortably! I shouldn't have hired the wheelchair in the first place, I shouldn't have given it to my mom to ride it without her having enough practice! Lessons learned!