Shannon Reilly, 13, was an avid gymnast until one day she did a double back flip- a normal move she’d done a million times. When she landed wrong, she heard a pop, and thought nothing of it, like most gymnasts do.
“I had fallen before,” Shannon says. “I didn’t think it was going to be anything big.”
Turns out, Reilly had broken her neck in two places and couldn’t move her arms or legs. Doctors told her there was a 99 percent chance that she would be paralyzed, and was lucky she didn’t die from her injuries.
Reilly, in a great showing of determination, was up and walking just a few days after under going surgery to have six screws and two rods placed into her back. After only one week, she was home, totally skipping any physical therapy.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you look at it, Reilly won’t ever be able to compete in sports again, but the Texas teen isn’t letting it get her down- she knows how lucky she is.
You may be asking yourself how someone so young could break their back and ‘think nothing of it’ but if you are the parent of a competitive gymnast, or ever were one yourself, you know exactly how.
Gymnastics is a children’s sport- many age out of it by the age of 16 because their bodies just can’t handle the stress, yet children’s bodies are the only one’s who can perform the high risk skills that gymnastics is comprised of. The hours and hours of pounding from tumbling, landings, and vaults does irreparable damage to young girls, having permanent effects like broken growth plates, stress fractures, and arthritis.
This isn’t just in some cases. I was a competitive gymnast myself and I never had a single teammate who wasn’t nursing some kind of injury. We would take hours before practice to ice and wrap our ankles and knees. Some had torn muscles. One girl had blood poisoning from getting chalk in a rip in her hand (rips are calluses that get ripped off, usually during bars, that leaves an open hole in your hand). I’ve had stress fractures in my hands, and also broke my back during a ‘routine’ landing. A girl with a shattered knee cap was still required to do practice bars and do conditioning. We popped Advil like Skittles and many got Cortisone shots to numb injuries for competitions.
When puberty hits, your body changes and you start to soften and round, which makes tricks that were so easy before, almost impossible. Many resorted to starving and purging to keep their weight down.
We were 13-15 years old.
Gymnastics taught me valuable lessons about hard work, dedication, sacrifice and money (I never heard the end of how expensive my training was) but in the end it left me with some gnarly scars, constant back pain and a lot of missed birthday parties. Some girls survive long enough to make it to the Olympics and fulfill their dreams, but for the rest, they end up hobbling out the back door into their parent’s cars with nothing but a few ice packs and a lot of broken dreams.
