“Broke Back, No Mountain”: Gabby Windey Details New Back Injury
Who knew vibration plates could be so harrowing?
Gabby Windey has officially joined the “society of bad backs” after a vibration-based injury.
The Traitors alum recently revealed that she broke her back while using a vibration plate, sharing photos from the hospital alongside an x-ray of her spine. “I’ve broken my back due to a speedy vibration,” she captioned her Instagram post. “And I’ve barely lived to tell the story.”
Windey elaborated further in a Substack essay she titled “Broke back, no mountain,” noting that she had been regularly using a vibration plate as part of her self-care routine. But while standing on the machine one morning, things went very wrong.
“I’m on level 30, supersonic speed. On one single vibration, lasting a millimeter of a second, each hip bone, the tippy top, what’s called the ischium, reaches high in earnest,” she wrote. “Seemingly, subtly, somewhere on the way to 30, maybe 10 or 20, my vertebrae turn crooked and rub against each other. A small piece breaks off from friction. It catches air. Then it lands softly, too softly, so softly the landing’s in question. And that’s what did it.”
Windey, who used to be a nurse, noted that she didn’t actually feel the fracture happen at the time. But the resulting injury has left her dealing with paresthesia, a nerve sensation that feels like tingling, itching, or numbness.
“It’s a feeling of increasing tension, growing towards climax. Like the inexorable climb towards an orgasm,” she described the feeling, in typical Gabby Windey fashion. “And reader, I hate to be crass, but, it is the only apt descriptor of the torment, I swear it. It wants to explode. A visceral need to erupt.”
Her essay continues on as she considers the line between self-care and self-destruction, writing, “Is it the beauty standard? Or is it self-love and care? The boundaries blur… It’s a little of both, I suppose.”
A fractured vertebra certainly seems like as good a reason as any to question where that boundary lies.
