Uh-oh – it finally happened. I finally managed to injure myself playing football.
I don’t actually understand what happened to me. My coach told me that I took a hit directly to my face, and I believe him – or, rather, I believe the massive bruise that’s spread across my nose and eyes. Apparently, nothing is broken, face-wise – although, I can’t lift my arms up to actually check for myself.
My shoulder took the next hit, I’m told, as I was laying splayed out on the ground. Some brute crashed directly into my arm. One of the best shoulder specialists in Melbourne had a look at it (he was the father of the brute who hit me) and he’s said it looks like it might need a procedure to repair a distal bicep tendon injury.
Whatever the hell that means.
It’s not too big of a deal at least. Well, on the right side at least. When I flipped over after the brute knocked my bicep almost off my damned arm, another idiot hit me from the other direction. Now my other arm is having issues, especially the shoulder area. That one might need something a little bit more extreme, like a trip to Melbourne. Rotator cuff repair surgery requires a specialist surgery, apparently, so they can’t do it at just any hospital.
So there it is – after close to a decade of high-impact sports, I finally took The Big One and hurt myself properly. My dad always warned me about this sort of thing, that every athlete had a Big Impact at some point in their career and I’d be lucky to have mine young, when my bones were still soft enough to take the hit and bounce back in no time.
‘It’s always sad seeing a grown man take his Big One,’ he’d say to me softly, when I was a child. ‘Something about the way that they just crack – you don’t see that in young kids.’
And then he turned the light off and promptly walked down the stairs, whistling to himself as I stayed bolt-upright in bed.