I’m a very active person and you won’t find me sitting still very often, so I jumped at the chance to squeeze in one more snowy adventure before the end of the winter season in Italy. We headed to Livigno for a little ski trip with about 20 of my boyfriend, Jordan’s work colleagues. Once settled in to our hotel, we got all of our equipment ready for that evening’s night ski.
As the weather was 13*C + we were contemplating just wearing sunglasses and beanie’s out on the slopes, but we ended up renting helmets just in case, as we’ve done for the last couple of years now. The night ski was amazing and the next morning we were up early after testing the snow, happy to get our ski legs back (and I won the slalom race too). All in all, a fantastic start to the trip! 
We headed up the first slope, to our dedicated red run, which was cordoned off for our group only. We had the eyes and talents of 3 instructors from St. Moritz teaching us, one of which was World Champion Alpine Skier Georgio Rocca… so we couldn’t have been in safer hands.
After a particularly fun run on the somewhat dissolving snow, we knew this really was the end of the season, but we were determined to enjoy every moment. Jordan and I skied to the instructors who were waiting at the plateau on the first third of the run, so that they could analyze and correct our bad habits. Once we reached them, we were given corrections to our techniques and told to carry on down the rest of the long, easy, white slope.
Whatever happened next is a mystery. There were no trees, rocks or molehills, I was told that Jordan had followed me over the ridge by a mere matter of seconds and in that time, I’d managed to somehow take quite a tumble. Face down in the snow, with no memory of the accident or quite where I was, the instructors and Jordan arrived to assess my situation. With short-term amnesia it was necessary to get me off the mountain with the medical team quite quickly, because on landing I had broken my helmet with the sheer force of the impact, so there was a real worry about how severe the concussion could be.
When you have a head injury – it’s quite common for your neck to feel as much, if not more, force through the impact and your muscles should (and did in my case) all come up to protect my spine, which meant I couldn’t move my head at all. Protected by the neck brace at the first clinic we arrived at, I was moved by helicopter to another much larger hospital about an hour from our town. There I had a CT scan to determine the spine and skull damage, which thankfully wasn’t more than a bad concussion! 
10 days later and the pain has now gone, the concussion subsided and this story has been well told, but had I not been wearing a helmet, my joy ride across the alps in a helicopter would have been a different tale. I grew up not wearing them but it’s terrifying to think that had I of been more concerned about my outfit than my safety, or been too over-confident in my ability, my injury would have been life-changing.
