Rylee Foster has the numbers “10:16” etched in red ink on her right arm.
This tattoo is a reminder of the moment when her life was forever changed.
It was at 10:16pm on October 16 last year when a car that Foster — a goalkeeper for Liverpool and Canada’s national team — was travelling in, with four friends, flipped into the air.
The group was on holiday to Finland, and were driving towards Helsinki to catch a concert by Drake. Foster was in Foster’s back seat with her seatbelt. It was dark, and the road was slippery and icy. She was the only one to be ejected from the car through the windscreen.
“I remember spinning but I don’t remember much else,” Foster tells The Athletic, as what she jokingly calls her “near-death-iversary” approaches.
Foster, now 24, is currently two months into her rehabilitation program at Rehab 4 Performance in the Garston district of Liverpool.
“I remember bits and pieces from the ambulance but not from my perspective — from an out-of-body perspective. They were watching me. It’s weird.”
She takes a moment to pause.
“I remember watching them do things… like I was dead, almost, but I don’t think I was, because I was awake.
“I was in the hospital and they were rushing around me, getting everything ready, and I remember watching them do that. I mentioned it to my mum and dad a couple of times, they didn’t like hearing it — nobody likes hearing that stuff.”
In four places, the Canadian broke her C1 vertebra (the neck bone below the skull), in two places. When she was thrown out of the car, her C2 and C3 also suffered fractures. “You don’t hear of that in sport. A single fracture may occur in one of your neck vertebrae, but not as severe. This is an unusual situation.
