Daily Loaf

“Are you ok?” I asked my friend after realizing that she wasn’t faking and couldn’t get up. She was sitting on the volleyball court with a fearful expression on her face. Looking at her face I also realized that she was in a lot of pain even though she was trying to hide it and stay calm.

I planned to have one of the best weekends ever at El Caribe hotel on Daytona Beach Shores. I absolutely love the beach. It’s a completely different world for me—a world where my worries and daily errands cannot reach me. It’s the world with no reception, where I’m completely disconnected from my daily chaos. I love the sunshine, even though I get sunburned almost every time I go. The threat of cancer doesn’t scare me away from my addiction to tanning. The sand adds a lot to the beach experience, making the beach a perfect place for volleyball. You can dive for a ball without getting hurt most of the time. But the best part is the water. The water literally is a different world, allowing you to do all kinds of things you can’t on land like surf, skim, ski; the list goes on and on. You can even make out in the water, adding a whole new dimension to the experience…

I’m getting sidetracked again. Let me get back to my friend. We were playing volleyball, nothing extreme. Alicia, my friend, went up for a powerful serve but came down wrong. Nobody thought it was anything serious at first, but that quickly changed when we realized she couldn’t get up. Something was wrong with her knee. Luckily for her, two of her friends were nurses. Because it was hard to tell whether the injury was serious right away, they decided to take my friend to her hotel room. Five minutes later Alicia was resting on her bed with an icepack on her knee.

As selfish as this sounds, for me the worst part about the trip was not the five minutes when we were worried about Alicia’s knee, but all the time that followed, sitting in the hotel room, seeing the beach so close away, but unable to go play on it for fear of making my friend feel left out. It was hard for me to make up my mind, so I am so glad that the friends with whom I went on this vacation were so supportive. We stayed in the room playing cards and watched a movie. That was not so bad.

I don’t really know how to fix a ruined vacation. I wish somebody would tell me how. I did what I thought would work. The golden rule for me in this situation was to do what I would want other people to do for me when I get hurt like that, which would be to leave me in a pool chair in the sun.

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