If you’ve ever had a bit of a mare on holiday (read: you got so drunk you made a complete fool out of yourself) you’ll feel the slightest bit of sympathy for this woman in Magaluf recently.
The holidaymaker had only been in the resort for three hours when she ended up face-planting the floor after a leap-frog gone wrong, ultimately breaking her nose in the process.
Chelsea Herbert, 24, was captured on camera attempting to jump over a bin before she got stuck on top of it. It’s at this point she lost her balance and plummeted towards the ground.
You can watch the moment she falls here:
The footage shows Chelsea falling face-first onto the pavement as she clutches her face in her hands, with her concerned friends watching close by.
The care-worker said she was inspired to jump over the bin after her nephew successfully cleared the top during a holiday in July.
She explained:
I’m 24 and I should know better, but these things happen. I won’t be jumping any bins again. I thought I would be clever after my nephew did it and he said there was no way I could do that.
I can’t. I toppled. I must have been very drunk to not have put my hands out at all. There was blood all around the bin and spots of blood everywhere. It was horrible.
Explaining how the group had ‘just arrived’ at the resort when the accident happened, Chelsea said she had ‘consumed quite a bit of alcohol’ when her ‘athletic’ nephew jumped over the bin.
Thinking she could be athletic too – although she admitted ‘I don’t know why I attempted to jump it because I can’t even do a handstand’ – Chelsea copied her 18-year-old nephew and soon ‘crashed and burned’.
The 24-year-old didn’t put her hands out when she hit the ground, and so the whole weight of her body went on her nose – hence the severity of her injuries.
Chelsea, from Reading, Berkshire, believes she hit a bolt when she hit the floor, as her nephew and brother-in-law returned to the bin the next day and saw ‘a lot of blood and a bolt on the floor’.
Although the care-worker said the pain ‘wasn’t that bad’ initially because the amount of alcohol she had consumed ‘managed to stop the pain’, the next morning she noticed her nose was ‘a bit wonky’ and two black eyes started to emerge.
The 24-year-old said other guests in the hotel were convinced she’d been in a fight or had a nose job, after they saw her sitting by the pool with a stitched up nose and two black eyes for the rest of the trip.
Chelsea said:
I was really conscious of it because everyone was staring and no one was really saying anything about it. In the daytime, everyone was gawping at me.
We were in Magaluf for a week. I did that on the first night, so by day four I had two massive black eyes. We were all-inclusive and I was around the pool and this woman came up to me and asked if I’d had a nose job. I had to explain I’d jumped a bin and it didn’t go well.
Having put up with the pain the entire week of her holiday – on top of not being able to taste anything because her nose was blocked – it only got worse on the journey home when her nose burst because of the air pressure on the plane.
After visiting a doctor in the UK, Chelsea explained what will happen next:
I think I’m going to need to have an operation to have it re-broken because it’s got a big dip in it. I can only breathe through one nostril.
It wasn’t all bad though, because Chelsea’s friend Charley Kimber, 24, was able to use the bin incident as a pulling tactic – using her pal’s broken nose as an ice breaker to chat up boys she fancied on the strip.
And you’ve got another thing coming if you think Chelsea’s broken nose ruined her holiday as she said she was ‘straight back out’, adding: ‘I’d paid too much money to get there to not’.
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).