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Birth of Adventure Part One – Discovering Adventure in New Zealand

My friend Christine urged me to take a pregnancy test.  We were talking on the phone, me in Wellington, New Zealand, and Christine in her London, UK flat. 

My period was late.  

“It’s probably the stress of your accident,” she said, “take the test and you’ll know for sure.”

I went out and bought a test and brought it back to my temporary residence.  I waited, peering at the stick through the criss-cross bandages engulfing my swollen and purple face.  Waiting to see if there would be one pink line meaning not pregnant, or two pink lines, meaning pregnant.

After the accident, my boss kindly put me up in her parent’s vacant home in Wellington until the doctor could sign off on me flying back home to Canada.

I had come to New Zealand for a work conference.  I was 27 and had a dream job – an international recruiter based in Toronto with colleagues in London, New Zealand and Australia.  My job was to recruit teachers from Canada to fill teaching positions in London during the UK teaching shortage.  After teaching in London for 2 years, I loved being able to bring the wonderful experience I’d had to others, and with the job I was able to travel. 

Flying all the way from Canada to New Zealand seemed like a once in a lifetime experience so I booked time off to backpack around the country after the conference.

Two weeks before, on what was supposed to be my last day in NZ, I’d popped into the Visitor Center in Queenstown, the “Adventure Capital of the World” looking for an activity to fill my time after the bus back to Wellington had been delayed.  

“What is the safest activity?” I’d asked.  

Within an hour I was strapped into a tandem hang glider with my instructor.  

His partner shoveled snow to form a slope so we could run off the cliff at 25 miles per hour.  I felt a sense of invigoration – the urge to feel the wind on my face, excitement about the sights we would see, all of which would be memorialized by the camera attached to the glider on a metal pole.

The beauty of New Zealand had dazzled me right from the beginning from the tiny plane window.  The shimmering blue sky that touched the blue of the ocean, swirling white clouds, and the endless green snow-topped mountains.  I felt like I was in the Lord of the Rings and would see a hobbit coming around the corner any second.  I was mesmerized.  

The spectacular views were what spurred me to try hang gliding.  I wanted to fly like a bird over the mountains. I’d never done anything like this and I loved the sense of adventure.  I also felt incredibly nervous – I was about to jump off a cliff. 

The instructor told me we needed to run to get the speed that would help us take flight. I asked him what would happen if we didn’t run fast enough?  “Not an option,” he said.

My heart raced as we ran.  My feet lifted up.  We were still too far from the edge – I tried to force my feet to the earth to gain the traction we needed.  

We got to the edge and jumped, and there was a slight lift, then a plummet.  White flashed by, snow flew past, then a strange feeling, like my face … crumpled. 

The glider stopped.  It was hard to open my eyes so I kept them closed.  I was dangling in my harness.  I heard the instructor swear.  After a moment he said “Lie still”. 

The details are fuzzy but his partner made his way to where we were, and they unfastened me from the harness, and I lay in the snow on the mountain while they called for help.  I asked what happened, and he said we crashed about 50 feet down the mountain.  He said my face took the force of impact from the metal camera pole.   

A helicopter landed and I was lifted into it and taken to the local hospital.  They then airlifted me to another hospital in Dunedin that specialized in facial reconstruction. 

It felt serious, but all I could think about was I had been in one hang glider, and two helicopter rides, and I still hadn’t been able to see the view of the breathtaking New Zealand landscape.  What a ripoff.

It’s strange what we worry about.  I was being taxied to major surgery and I was worried about not seeing the view, and about what people would think.  A kind nurse talked with me, and I asked him if he would be mad at his partner for doing something careless like hang gliding. I thought about my parents, and my boyfriend David, and worried if they’d be furious at me for doing this.  

I was taken in for xrays and the radiologist asked me if I was pregnant.  I shook my head and said “No”.  

After looking at the images, they said my nose and left cheekbone had been crushed and would require surgery to pin and repair the bones.  There was a deep laceration on my cheek that would be sutured as best as possible, but it wasn’t a clean cut, and parts of the flesh were gone. I asked if I would have a scar, and they just looked at me wordlessly.

I don’t remember the pain at first, I might have been in shock, but after surgery it was brutal. The worst was when they took out the packs of cotton in my nose – they dropped morphine directly into my nostrils as they pulled out the packing – it was worse than anything I’d felt before.

I still hadn’t seen my face and I was afraid to look.  When I could get out of bed I walked to the mirror in the bathroom.  My face was criss crossed with bandages, my skin different shades of red and purple. 

When they later changed the bandages I saw my face clearly for the first time.  It no longer looked like the face I knew.  The stitches were an angry jagged line across my left cheek from the bottom of my nose to the outside corner of my eye. My broken nose and cheek were puffy and red. The left side of my mouth drooped limply.  I crookedly smiled at my reflection, only the right side lifting with the motion.  I wondered if it was because of the swelling on the left side.

The nurse saw me looking mournfully at my face.  

“You’re very lucky you know”, she said.  “The Doctor is the best in the country.  You should have seen what you looked like before.”  

I probably should have felt lucky, and lucky to be alive, but I didn’t feel lucky at all.  I looked like Quasimodo.

The Doctor visited me and asked how I was doing.  I asked him about my mouth, why was the left side of my face drooping and would it get better soon?

He said very plainly that it might be permanent.

I stared at him shocked.

He explained that the nerves were likely cut and that it was possible they could regrow but it was also possible they might never recover.

I cried.  I had kept myself together so far but imagining I could never smile properly again was too much.

I knew I should feel lucky – I was alive.  I hadn’t broken or lost any limbs.  The pole had missed my eye, my ear, my teeth.  But I’d struggled with body image throughout my life, and finally I’d gained a level of comfort with who I was, and how I looked.  My boyfriend David loved my eyes and my smile.  My left eye was different now – pulled tautly from the cut.  I had an angry scar across my cheek. And I was hearing that at 27 I could go the rest of my life with half of my face paralyzed.  

I tried to pull myself together as the doctor watched me silently.  He then told me that I was ready to leave the hospital.

I burst into tears again.  I had nowhere to go.  My family and friends were over 9000 miles away.  My boss was in Wellington on the North Island.  I was in Dunedin on the South Island over 17 hours away by bus.  Weak and concussed, I couldn’t imagine making that journey by myself.

When I told him the situation, he was my hero.  Accidents are covered fully by insurance in New Zealand and he arranged for me to stay in a rehab hospital for a week before going back to Wellington.

While there I started to cheer up.  My boss sent me a care package with treats and books.  The hang gliding company sent me a package with my belongings, my coat, my wallet with passport, and a full refund of the fees I’d paid them.  The hospital had volunteers who would visit and spend time with the patients.  This was before Facebook and Facetime, but I managed to talk to my family and to my boyfriend David on the phone.

When I described my face to David, he told me I was beautiful no matter what.

I was still foggy and feeling weak, but with help from a colleague in Christchurch and my boss, I made it back to Wellington and moved in temporarily to the beautiful home overlooking the water of Cook’s Strait, with rolling hills and grazing sheep in the distance.  I desperately wished I could be home with my family and friends, but being stuck on the other side of the world, it is hard to imagine being given a better place to recover.

Waiting until I was cleared to fly home, I spent the days trying to work in the Wellington office, and the nights by myself, calling loved ones around the world.  (And note, I had not yet considered the astronomical cell phone bill I was racking up with a 2002 Canada cell phone plan calling North America and the UK from New Zealand – yikes!).

One night watching the Bridget Jones Diary DVD for the millionth time on my laptop I started realizing my period was late. 

It was mid-June.  I’d had my last period before David and I had traveled to London and Wales, in late April.  Had it been 6 weeks?  7?

Frantically I called Christine and she reassured me that this was to be expected with so much stress.   She said I should just go and take a test so I wouldn’t worry about this on top of everything else.  

There was no way I could be pregnant.  When the radiologist had asked if I was pregnant, I hadn’t even stopped to consider the possibility.   But there was a possibility.

I wasn’t ready to be pregnant.  I’d only been dating David for six months.  He lived in America, I lived in Canada.  I had a fulfilling job, I traveled, I was never at home.  I’d imagined that one day, maybe at 35 I would have kids, but not now.  And I was literally broken, still recovering, still foggy and concussed.

Christine was right, I should get the test so I could rule it out. 

And that is why I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, facing out at the bathroom door, staring intently at the pregnancy stick in my hands, swollen face and all.

And as I saw the second pink line forming I felt the dizzying feeling of running off the cliff, not knowing if the glider would catch the wind or plummet down the mountain.

I was pregnant.

Read the next part of this story in Birth of Adventure, Part Two – Choosing Adventure