Planetina

A lot has changed since I wrote my last post… At the beginning, this blog was more or less my travel journey, but because of the current situation, I didn’t get to travel much in 2020, but this doesn’t mean that I was stuck in one place. In fact Corona made a refugee out of me, because I had to move out of my room and landed on a friend’s couch for a while. The lockdown took my freedom to travel away, but I noticed that getting to know new parts of Austria felt like discovering a new country, while staying inside the border. So I was checking out new climbing regions and everything felt like the world was normal again, till one piece of rock pulled me down…

I will spare you the details of how everything went wrong, from the planning to communication, but as an experienced climber I had thought I had everything under control. I was climbing a 70 meter long route with a 70 meter rope and just before the end of it, I saw a solid block of stone the size of my upper body. I first knocked on it and it sounded okay, so I decided to trust it and when I wanted to take a quickdraw from my harness I suddenly realized… S**T, I DON’T FEEL ANY GRAVITY :O…

What followed was an awkward feeling…  suddenly I felt as if I had left my body… I saw everything from the back as if I were a backpack. My arms were trying to grab on something when I hit the wall with my foot and it turned me upside down. But the fall continued. It is interesting how time felt different everything slowed down, there were thoughts racing through my mind like „Did the block hit my climbing partner?!!“, „Am I still on belay?“ and then I hit the wall again with my head and it turned me again, now I was flying down with my back against the wall, watching the beautiful landscape in front of me and it struck me ‘’Am I going toward the ground, IS THIS IT???“… Then I hit the wall again with my back and continued to fly down. 

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When I realized I couldn’t do anything, I accepted that these were probably my last seconds. I thought about my life „IT was awesome, I LIVED FULLY and if this is it, then I wanna enjoy the last views I have“. In that moment I felt such deep peace in me, there was no room for fear, just total calmness and I was ready to hit the ground.

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But then I felt a pull… the fall stopped after about 15 meters. Instantly it pulled me back into my body and I moved my arms and legs, to see if I am able to move. Seeing the blood I knew I was injured, but I also knew I was probably in shock and I needed to used this state to save myself without calling for rescue (climbing wasn’t allowed at that time during the lockdown, because it is considered dangerous and a waste of resources, should there be an accident). So I climbed back up to the end of the route and at the top I untied myself from the rope and walked down the way beside the wall. 

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I didn’t go to hospital, because everything was focused just on one thing… Corona, as if no other diseases or health issues existed. What followed were weeks of pain… I had a cut on my head, but I let it heal on it’s own. I noticed I couldn’t cough, sneeze nor laugh, so I guess my ribs were bruised or broken, but this healed on it’s own as well. My ankle was huge, I couldn’t walk, but with the help of my friend, I was going out for short walks which became longer and longer. The new normality became bed and walks, a total contrast to my active lifestyle before the fall…

But I put my focus on what I could do and not on things I couldn’t do at that state… This, along with seeing progress from week to week is what kept me going. What was important regarding my rehabilitation were my friends, they lifted me up, they got me out of bed, they listened to me and they gave me hope, so this is why I am still here. If I had isolated myself as the government were demanding I probably wouldn’t be alive anymore, but I did what instinctively felt right and natural, I wasn’t alone.

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My life changed a lot, from finding a new job to moving to a new city, I even fell in love and settled down 🙂 . But I really used this new life opportunity to work on my life and change it the way I wanted. Life is damn too short to waste it on things you don’t like, so ask yourself, what you want and work on the changes you want to make in your life.

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Why I am writing this post? Because the world is still normal, you just need to find your normality and focus more on what you can do, rather than on what you can’t and on what you have… if you don’t have it, you probably don’t need it 😉 . What are you afraid of? Is it dying of corona? We all will die and this is a FACT and NORMAL, but not everyone lives! So if you truly live, then you don’t fear death, because you don’t have anything to regret.