I love gymnastics! Gymnastics was my whole life before I got hurt. I would train at the least, 15 hours a week. Sometimes I would train up to 30 hours a week. Practices were 3 to 6 days a week, 3 to 5 hours long! It was hard on me and I got sick of it, but for some reason something kept pulling back into the gym.

I don't know why I kept going back to practice when I could have had an actual life. I guess I kept going back because I was told I was amazing and I showed a lot of potential most children/teens don't have. (I trained at the University of Kentucky.) My coach had told me that if I stayed with gymnastics he would give me a 4-year scholarship to UK. I was only 13 years old! I didn't even know if I wanted to go to college and if I did, I didn't know where I wanted to go. I was just trying to get out of high school!

I guess I also kept going back because it was something I was good at and it gave me something to do everyday after school. I have so many friends from the gym and I love hanging out with them.

However, I missed out on school activities and school friends and school sports. I missed out on a lot because of gymnastics. I am only 14 years old and I feel like I've missed out on everything; UNTIL NOW!

This injury has caused me to have nightmares and I am worried that when (if) I go back to gymnastics; I'm worried that I'll be afraid to do anything. Right now I feel that if I go back-I'll have to leave the practice because I'll be too afraid to try anything. I don't want to ever get hurt like this again! It was horrible and I hated every minute of it.

I did benefit from the injury though. Having this injury has given me time off of practice to decide what I want to be when I grow up. It's given me time to hang out with my school friends. It's given me time to be with my family. It's given me time to play in the snow and go to movies and shop. It's given me a new life-I didn't know existed.

I'm sad that I had to get hurt the way I did in order to see this new life, but I'm happy it happened because it let me see this new life.

My injury is somewhat disturbing. All I knew was I even had 2 of my friends at my gymnastics gym run to the bathroom to throw-up.

You see I was at practice when I got injured. (I'm sure you probably guessed that.) Anyways, my starting event was the "uneven bars." If you don't know, women's gymnastics has 4 apparatuses; vault, bars (called the uneven bars), beam

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