They always told us “Don’t do that, you can get hurt” but we never listened. That day was the one day I regretted not listening to the Angel Elementary lunch staff. It was a week before midwinter break when my family and I were going to go to Cancun, Mexico. My friends and I just finished eating lunch, and we wanted to go outside to mess around, and have fun until the lunch bell rang to tell us to come inside. We almost always played a game where we would chase each other around the playground, but that day we decided to change it up. My friends and I decided to go play on the swings.

At first we were just swinging on the swings like normal, and having a random nonsense fifth grader conversation, but after about five minutes of that, we decided to have a competition to see who could jump off the swing the furthest. We all took turns swinging as high as we could to propel ourselves as far as we could. We each went a few times and one of my other friends was in the lead, and me being pretty competitive, I tried swinging as high as I could, and as I went to jump off, I leaned back to try to get further than my friend, but as I leaned back, I started to slide backwards. My feet caught the swing and I did almost a full backflip off the swing, and I was four feet in the air. As I tried to land the backflip, my feet slipped out from under me and I hit the ground with lots of force. This only happened in a period of about five to ten seconds, but it felt like I was moving in slow motion as I was falling off the swing. When I hit, the group of friends I was with ran over to see if I was okay. I got up onto my feet holding my left arm, with my friends surrounding me asking if I was okay. The only pain I felt was a sharp pain in my left arm when I hit the ground, but the pain was slowly fading. One of the lunch supervisors that told us not to jump off the swings ran over to me and my friends asking if anybody got hurt. She saw me holding my arm and told me and one of my friends to go inside to the nurse’s office to call my parents to take me to the hospital, to see if I broke my arm or not. I haven’t broken a bone before, so I didn't know what to expect. Two years earlier, I sprained my ankle on a trampoline, but that was the most major injury I have had up until then. In the nurse’s office, I was given an ice pack, and the nurse called my stepmom to tell her to come get me to take me to the hospital.

At the hospital, my stepmom checked me in, and we waited for about ten minutes until one of the nurses came in to the waiting room. We went into a small dark room with a few small machines. The nurse took my arm and put it on one of the small machines, and put a lead vest to protect me from the radiation that came from the x-ray machine. The machine had a few quick flashes of light, then the nurse came back over to me and took off the vest. The nurse had me sit in a wheelchair as she wheeled me back to a small decorated room with a small tv.

After what felt like hours of me watching tv, the nurse came back into my room holding the x-rays of my arm.
“I have good news, and bad news what would you like to hear first.” she said

“The bad news I guess.” I said

“Well your arm is fractured in two spots, but the good news is that the fractures are not that bad, they will heal in around three weeks, but you will need a cast for it.”

“We are going to go to Mexico in a few days, will it interfere with his ability to swim or other things like that?” Lana said

“There is a waterproof cast that you can get, but it costs five hundred dollars.” Lana didn't want to spend five hundred dollars on a cast so we just got a normal one.

On our way to Mexico in the airport, I had to get my cast searched. After a long wait through airport security, we were got on the plane. In Mexico, I wasn't able to swim for the first half, but then I just didn't really care if I got it wet or not.