Two Weeks Post Injury

Pretty lil pic of my knee and all its glory :) ACL is the alien finger looking thing coming out of my tibia. A healthy ligament doesn't look all fucked up, so there's your reference.

The twelfth day from when I injured my knee was the first day I did not cry. Me and my stone cold heart cried for twelve mother effin’ days straight! I swear, every morning I woke up, I looked a little bit more and more like Rocky in the latter rounds of Apollo beating the shit out of him; my eyes were so swollen and squinty, SO damn squinty. But this week was better; impatience has settled, probably because the brunt of the mourning has ceased.

I went through a revelation this past week. In the beginning of the week, one of my doctors told me that an inactive person can live without their ACL, but to live an active lifestyle, one needs their ACL; therefore, at the moment, I feel as though I am not living. I went to my physician to do some pre-op stuff, and she said something about my surgery being elective and not emergency, since my life is not at risk, obviously. You probably get where I’m going with this, but it feels like an emergency; I feel like my life is at risk because there’s a huge part that I’m not living. There’s a part of me that continues to feel bad for myself and another part of me that feels so self-centered for saying that when there are people in this world that have actual problems that physically prevent them from fully living their lives.

Athletes give so many reasons as to why they play sports, but injuries can seriously distort those reasons. This is the third consecutive summer I’ve sat out with an injury, and they have progressively gotten worst with longer recoveries each time. This time, I broke. I didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t want to play anymore. And that is the most difficult and cowardly thing for me to admit. After speaking with one of my coaches this week, he compared these kinds of serious injuries to the loss of a loved one, and as dramatic as that sounds, there is a sense of truth to it. One of the things I love the most was unfairly taken away from me. In this case, the loss isn’t permanent, yet still devastating.

So getting to the revelation part, I realized there is a point where you stop questioning why shit happens, and start dealing with the shit that happened. So here’s the shit: ACL is torn, nine-month recovery is to follow, and sophomore season is out of the question. But it could be worse; this could have happened in season so I would have lost a year of eligibility, crutching around Loyola’s hilly ass campus that is too small to drive around, and would have been crying in front of all my teammates, coaches, friends (like I have any besides my teammates), and professors. So yeah, definitely could be worse.

Back to my point of this week being better: it’s the last week I walk around with a torn ACL because in two days I’ll be fixed. The shit is starting to be dealt with, as I’ve been prehabbing the hell out of my knee all week preparing for the surgery. I have just begun to allow myself to accept the words of encouragement and prayer that I have received. And I’ve finally allowed myself to gain some perspective over the fact that there is more to this world, to my world, than just a game. The light at the end of the tunnel is slowly appearing, but I know I have a long ways to go until I reach it.