"It wasn't your fault," my sports medicine doctor repeats to me over and over on the phone, a slurry of lines that blend together in a slew of sounds that assault every available piece of my brain.
I sat in the quiet of the empty building, the low buzz of the overhanging lamps slowly igniting the tears forcefully held in the back of my eyes.
I laughed quietly.
"I tore my ACL," I mouthed, trying out the foreign words with my tongue.
I laughed forcefully again.
"I'm no longer an athlete."
They ask how it happened. The standard question, of course, when waiting around for a doctor's appointment, a physical therapy session, when they see the ice wrapped around my knee or when the day's force on my legs causing me to lean heavily on one side.
I smile. I laugh. I pat the old scarred cap I've come to accept as my knee, and I begin the story I've practiced over and over and over:
"It was a freak accident, really. I play rugby--no, it's not what you're thinking. We had an indoor practice. We were scrimmaging, simple touch stuff on one of the basketball courts, and one of the girls tossed me a bad ball, the green and blue stripes spinning into the neighboring court, where some guys were playing pickup. I had already run into the fencing team and random guys waiting their turn ten or twelve times throughout practice, so I took off sprinting after the ball to try and curb their anger at our interference with their court space. I had twisted my right ankle the previous weekend in a game, straining some of my calf muscles as well. I was leaning heaving on my left leg, and I lunged for the ball. I felt it. My back foot catching on the resin of the basketball court that's so perfect for quick stop and go jump shots, a place I worshipped throughout high school ball.
I felt like my whole leg was sliding in different directions, my knee deciding to make a round trip to my hamstrings. There was a brief flash of some of the most intense pain I've ever felt in my entire life. The doctors say the femur went forward, my shin went back, my ACL snapped clear in half, and my knee dislocated. I laid on the floor of the gym floor in complete silence. In typical Savannah fashion, I began stretching my leg rhythmically. Forward. Back. Left. Right. I. Up. Am. Down. Fine. Hold. And then I had surgery."
This, most simply, is what most people are concerned about. In order to quell their curiosity, I supplanted a story that includes the peaks of what they want to hear: the action. the horror. and most importantly, my optimism. They want to see my story fueled by an aggressive smile, a stretch of the leg that shows gashes and indents but healing most of all. They get their tidbit, I express my positivity about recovery, and on rare occasions, a few souls will ask about my recovery time. "Nine to ten months, just to be sure." I grin extra hard at that part.
It's all part of the play.
I want to tell them, I really do, but the mentality of most, whether they actively or passively express it, is that they simply don't care. They're indifferent to your circumstance. Perhaps its simply the American way, of that I'm somewhat unsure (as most common in Europe, you don't ask unless expecting an honest answer), but I see it in people's eyes. How they smile at me and want me to tell them what they want to hear.
And so I do.
But if I had the chance to tell them another story, I would.
I was in the greatest shape of my entire life. I worshipped the gym, I worshipped the roads I pushed my body on day in and day out, the weights that became extensions of myself, the slight sweat in my palm separating my skin from the cool metal the only reminder that we were not one.
In sprints I was pushing past any pain threshold I ever had before. I broke through walls of days and weeks and months of depression and anxiety and dissatisfaction of the person I was, my body, my identity. I felt a burn in the deepest part of myself, a light I had only felt nearly a year and a half ago.
I was on mile 9 of my first half marathon, the stale air heavy with the breath of the exhausted runners I passed left and right, those who stopped to catch their breath on a steep hill of blistering black asphalt, those who most likely would not begin running again. Their sluggishness made my own time slow, the feeling in my legs numbing as I pushed harder and harder up the incline that took down so many of my competitors. And I felt that light deep inside of me, a third wind or adrenaline or a kick in the ass by God that had me going faster and faster and chill bumps raising on every surface of my skin in the midst of the some of the harshest heat conditions I had ever run in. I found my breath coming easier and flush throughout me, defying bodily function, refreshing my body and my mind and carrying me farther and farther away from the dead zone.
For the first time in a long time, by body and mind were in sync. For the first time in a long time, I felt okay. And I was able to look in the mirror without echoes of my eating disorder creeping in from the edges, I was able to focus better in school, for the first time in my entire life felt in control and satisfied with who I was, what I looked like, and what I was doing. I was happy.
Rugby fueled a large part of this. My decision to rejoin the team stemmed largely from my ability to finally accept myself as both a woman and an athlete, two roles which, while I loved, found came into conflict many times over. My decision to come back was one that took over a year of self-examination and rehabilitation of my mind. It's a fact I don't share with many people. I had to separate myself from something I loved because I couldn't take the pressures and judgments from strangers to the field. I was very passive-aggressive.
The weekend before my injury, I played in a game at Kennesaw State, ironically enough the very first field I played on as a freshman rugger exactly two years prior. Everything felt right. The way I played, how I was running... the tapes show me hunched over every break, coughing up a storm from fighting off the remnants of a sickness that I didn't let affect me. I tore through defensive lines, smashing one girl to the floor, her back barely hitting the astroturf before I shouldered through her tag-along, fighting with every ounce of my being to the try-line. I had a fire within me once again, and I felt it all the time. I was a monster. I was unstoppable. Every insult, every stab about my thighs or my aggression or my looks came crashing down with every play. Everything was right. This was right.
We were practicing indoors because of the rain. I was late, as per usual. And I was pushing harder and faster with every drill. The clock bled red onto the walls to my exhausted eyes, indicating how few minutes we had left of practice. My mind was preoccupied with the assignments I had to turn in before the night's end as we lined up for scrimmaging.
I've thought about the five minutes leading up to my injury thousands of times since the incident. It follows me subconsciously. It stares me in the face whenever I glance down at my legs. It haunts me when I go to sleep, when I have that recurring dream where I'm running through fields and forests and I wake up at 3am and feel the locking sensation in my knee and realize it's not real, none of it's real except the fact that I can hardy bend my leg much less sprint anytime soon, and I sob myself quietly back to sleep before someone can hear me.
When I felt my foot stay behind in that swift lunge, part of me knew immediately. I usually omit the popping sensation from my story, because every fiber of my being fought to forget that part of the incident mere seconds later. Imagine your legs bending in all the wrong ways, like a twisted horror movie when your knee bends inward, everything shifting outside of your control as you come crashing face-first onto the dust-lined floor. I didn't give a shit about the pain I felt. That lasted maybe an eighth of a second. Your ACL doesn't have many nerve endings in it anyway, so I didn't feel it much afterwards either.
What I did feel, however, was an overwhelming choking. It was like my entire spirit, that fire, extinguished, upped and left when it sensed weakness. My mind fought with every ache of my leg, rationalizing knee sprains and ligament sprains as I tried not to hyperventilate. For three minutes I sat on that floor, my mind a continuous string of the ankle rolls and freak accidents as a child I had managed to safely walk away from, my stretching more of something to preoccupy my shaking hands while my heart attempting to free itself from the cage of my chest cavity with its frantic thrusting.
I stood up. I felt nothing. And I took myself back into the game after a light jog. Perhaps a bit swollen, but nothing.
And when my teammate passed me the ball and I immediately cut left I felt it yes I felt it with not just my knee now but with my entire body and my heart and my brain knew it knew something was wrong with how it twisted up and how my kneecap was moving wherever it wanted and how the swelling was encroaching too swiftly for a sprain and when I hit the floor for the second time in those five minutes I knew it was over and I was done and something was very very wrong and for the first time in a long time I felt a prickling sensation in my eyes and realized that I wanted to cry.
I texted my brother that night about how weird my knee felt. And he knew it then too, though he hid it from me. I mentioned the popping noise i heard in a passing message, and he told me to go see a doctor in the morning. Just to see.
The very next morning, I got up early to visit student health, the constant buckling of my knee bringing a slight bile to my throat from anxiety. And she moved my leg around, moved the kneecap, asked me questions and questions and looked at me with these pitying eyes at the end of the appointment that I trusted to tell me I was okay, that I was going to back to normal in no time, and referred me to a sports medicine doctor nearby.
And I wrapped my knee in some crappy ACE bandage, holding myself by a single thread as I grinned at the woman making my appointment. I opened the door to the back garage and felt the crisp February slowly leak into my lungs, though my organs felt frozen to the spot. With one last buckle to my knee, the familiar sensation of my leg caving in on itself, I sat on the ground beside my car and cried. I cursed rugby and school and life and the doctors who wouldn't tell me what was going on and my decisions but most of all my indecision and how I wasted so much time thinking and overanalyzing and never enough time doing and not caring. I cursed myself most of all. I choked out guttural moans of self-pity, hiccups of salt and tears that echoed in the half-empty parking garage that early in the morning.
I drove to the clinic. An older woman sat next to me in the waiting room, eyeing me with those sad eyes I would come to get used to in the next few weeks, blessing my heart as I struggled to grasp the pen in front of me, to write down for what felt like the fifteenth time what was wrong.
After driving home to get an MRI that weekend, I returned to school, a brace providing small amounts of comfort to the anxiety that had begun to consume my life. Everyone stared at me. I could barely walk.
My dad, the president of "put a bandaid on it and keep playing," reassured me in those next few days that it was just a sprained knee. He promised everything was fine. “You’re a strong girl,” he said, “this is nothing.”
The doctor called me as I was sitting alone in my favorite study spot, tucked away in a little corner that no one ever noticed, much less frequented.
I knew immediately from his tone what was wrong. And as that fear I kept locked away and hidden deep, deep down inside me came to fruition I could simultaneously feel my body begin to crumble. I sat down. I said I understood. He told me he was going to get me with the best surgeon in Atlanta. That life wasn’t over for me as an athlete.
“How long am I going to be out?”
“At least nine months.”
I smiled that sickly sweet smile I would soon make my staple, and I hung up the phone.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my entire life. I also never thought my body was capable of producing that many tears.
I first called my father. And I first explained, calmly and clearly, exactly what the doctor said to me. That I needed surgery.
Then I screamed. And I blamed him and I had no awareness or care rather for the people that heard me or saw me be reduced to a lucid mess of emotion and pain. I broke that day. I broke with finality, body and spirit.
And in the midst of these tears and flagrant curses to him and the world for delivering me this fate, he managed to ask if that’s what the doctor really said, as if it wasn’t enough that I told him, as if it were not really possible, as if I would be joking, and I managed to bite my tongue for mere seconds before bursting into tears yet again, our conversation merely my sobs and their echoes on the other end of the line.
In many ways, I don’t think he ever wanted to accept that his daughter, the one that built herself up to be this unbreakably strong and badass character, was capable of falling. I registered his shock and inability to help me as disappointment. As failure. He didn’t even know how to comfort me.
I hung up the phone before he could give me another empty promise, another wish that “things could be worse.” Do you know what it’s like to be feel the most unlike yourself, so different inside and outside you feel as though you hardly recognize yourself, and be told that the pain you’re feeling should be quelled because COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING it’s not as bad as it could be?
It makes you feel very, very small.
My brother gave what he could to me: realistic smidgeons of what the next few months held for me. He strained and then tore his hamstring in football his senior year of high school, an injury that sent recruiters packing and his mind into a very dark, dark place. “It’s more in your head than you would think...”
And I collapsed on the stoop of a building I could hardly see through the faucet I could now call my eyes, wailing that I couldn’t handle it. I had just managed to put my eating disorder behind me. I had just made it through one of the worst depressive episodes I had ever experienced. I had finally felt okay and happy and I wanted to tear my leg off like some sort of animalistic brute, to detach this physical weakness that was seeping energy and life from the rest of my body.
This began the downward spiral.
I made it through the week. I explained to the curious about the freak accident that landed me in this position. I laughed off the pain I felt inside and outside.
I had surgery the week before my spring break. People sent texts of encouragement, wished me good luck. I woke up and couldn’t feel anything below my hip. My parents brought me home.
What I gloss over most, when people care to ask me about how the recovery process is for ACL reconstructive surgery, was those first few days post-op. Your body undergoes this massive trauma, and you really don’t feel it until the numbness fades. You’re lulled into this sense of safety and control, of being okay, and then the pain hits.
I felt it when I got home. I managed to crutch my way the few feet between the garage and parent’s room before being hit with an overwhelming urge to throw up. My leg dragged helplessly along, hindering me as I desperately tried to make it to a bathroom. My mother caught me as I tried to sit down, but in my fainting spell I merely collapsed on the seat. The fan was loud oh so loud and the whirring was making my ears bleed and I begged her to turn it off and yanked my hair in a desperate attempt to distract myself from the overwhelming pain I felt everywhere--in my leg, in my brain, in my weak muscles.
You try and numb the pain in your body and the consequent pain in your mind with medication. I never wanted to stop taking my oxycontin. I instantly faded when I took it, the pills blissing me out to a place where everything was fuzzy and I just slept and slept and slept. And even then, in my special place, I knew that this couldn’t last forever.
You see, when you tear your ACL, the first thing surgeons press for is your immediate physical therapy, absolutely as soon as possible. By day three, I could hardly make it to the bathroom by myself, much less raise my leg however high. I was discouraged by my body’s inability to do what I wanted, and I was confused and angry at the disconnect this limb seemed to feel with the rest of my body.
Nothing was going right. It was the same week as my birthday, an event I couldn’t even fathom. The first time I was allowed to shower, I had to have my mom strip me. I was completely helpless. I was a child.
The water was therapeutic. The constant patter of the drops on my aching scalp and back soothed me momentarily, before I was overcome by nausea. I shut the water off and had to call for my mom to help me. The blackness was encroaching on my sight, and I wanted to cry I was so frustrated with how my body was betraying me. My mom managed to wrap a towel around me as I crutched the few steps to my room, leaning slightly against the dresser as my she asked for two more minutes to finish changing the sheets.
And then I was gone. She said my eyes fluttered back, and I precariously swayed back and forth on my crutches before diving face first toward the floor. She managed to kick out my bad leg from under me, saving it from reinjury. If it had bent, I would have torn my new acl. I woke up in a mess on the floor, in some of the most excruciating pain in my life, rivaling even the times I was impaled by railroad track spikes in my legs and hand. Everything was on fire and I was subconsciously aware that this was the most movement my leg had for days and I needed to get up but I physically couldn’t and I felt trapped on that rug and I felt the tears sliding down my face before I registered the sobs instinctively wracking my chest in response to the pain and my mother somehow managed to throw my body with a strength I never knew she possessed onto the bed and I collapsed into as much of a fetal position as I could manage, stark naked, letting my emotions take complete control, not even sparing my mother a second before I allowed myself to be overcome with self-pity.
I could hear my mother’s heaving from the doorway as she stood and watched me. She didn’t say anything.
My mom, my caretaker, had to return to work after a while. I was left alone with my thoughts, alone with the injury and the circumstances I had begun to hate every second, a pain that never seemed to stop despite the pills and pills and exercise, a burn that faded into an ache that kept me up all night, never allowing me one night’s sleep.
I had to teach myself how to walk again. Every doctor I called in a panic about the lightning that rocketed up my shin every time I pressed the slightest weight on my foot told me to keep going, that eventually my body would get used to the pain. It’s not easy motivating yourself to do anything, especially when you’re injured, when every piece of your soul and being is aching for you to stop, begging and pleading to stop and lay down.
And the second night after this impossible task, my parents came home and asked how my walking was coming. I was quiet. I went to bed. And that night, when the familiar throb of pain returned to my knee like clockwork, I heaved myself upward and crutched to my door, somehow awakening my parents in the process.
They asked me to go back to sleep, begged me to just lay down, that I was going to hurt myself.
And maybe it was my medication, or maybe it was because I was so far gone mentally and physically, but the truth of the words my brother spoke to me on the phone that one afternoon were echoing everywhere and I finally understood but more than anything I saw how much everyone besides me didn’t. They didn’t get it.
I threw the crutches with whatever small strength I could manage across the room. The metal ricocheted off the wall, the pang carrying up to my sister’s room, where her screams of “what the fuck is going on?” were drowned out only by my parent’s shouts for me to calm down. I could barely hear them above my hyperventilating. I didn’t want to hear them. I fell towards the nearest couch, screaming as loud as I could to drown everyone out. For the world to be silent for once.
Everyone finally left me alone.
I survived the next few days solely due to one person, someone who had reached out to me before my surgery, who had been through similar (but worse) circumstances the previous year. It’s different talking to someone who’s been there, who doesn’t say things just to make you feel better, who comforts you in a way of just knowing how it is to feel so utterly unlike yourself and out of control. I felt sane talking to him. I finally felt like what I was feeling didn’t make me crazy.
I never told him, and I downplayed what effect he had in my recovery... but his encouragement and empathy was what allowed me to finally feel like myself again.
School became an impossibility for me. I was consumed with rehabilitation, so focused on getting better and allowing how my knee felt to dictate my mood day in and day out. Some days I would leap out of bed without a creak in my knee, and other times the swelling and the knowing my knee wasn’t well and would never be what it used to be really got to me.
I became perpetually anxious. Stairs terrify me. Every creak, every pop of my knee sends a wave of nausea down my spine, plaguing me until my physical therapist can confirm in person that I didn’t reinjure myself.
Academics fell on the wayside. I became exhausted with rehab, my mind and body consumed with how I wasn’t getting better as quickly as I wanted. I was impossibly unmotivated, and missing so much school continually kept me behind, no matter how much work I did. I was tired, stressed to the extreme. I developed psoriasis a few weeks after this surgery, the basis of which my doctor explained was the extreme amount of physical trauma and emotional stress I had consistently been since the incident. I wasn’t that surprised.
Every single day is a struggle to feel myself again. To not allow this injury to dictate when I feel happy, to feel that there is hope. Talking with those in my physical therapy, my trainers--that helped the most. I have my good days and my terribly awful stay-in-bed-to-avoid-the-world days that have become a norm since this injury. But more than anything, this injury that has had a catastrophic effect on how I live day in and day out and how I see myself has given me so much insight on the aspect of injury never talked about by doctors, by family: anxiety and depression. And how more than anything, this level of injury should require doctors to brace their patients on the psychological rehabilitation just as much, if not more so, than the physical. To tell them that these feelings are normal, and not to be afraid to reach out for help.
An athlete with a naturally competitive mentality needs to know that depression and anxiety aren’t weaknesses. And there should be a support resource in place for those in recovery from the very beginning.
I sat in the quiet of the empty building, the low buzz of the overhanging lamps slowly igniting the tears forcefully held in the back of my eyes.
I laughed quietly.
"I tore my ACL," I mouthed, trying out the foreign words with my tongue.
I laughed forcefully again.
"I'm no longer an athlete."
They ask how it happened. The standard question, of course, when waiting around for a doctor's appointment, a physical therapy session, when they see the ice wrapped around my knee or when the day's force on my legs causing me to lean heavily on one side.
I smile. I laugh. I pat the old scarred cap I've come to accept as my knee, and I begin the story I've practiced over and over and over:
"It was a freak accident, really. I play rugby--no, it's not what you're thinking. We had an indoor practice. We were scrimmaging, simple touch stuff on one of the basketball courts, and one of the girls tossed me a bad ball, the green and blue stripes spinning into the neighboring court, where some guys were playing pickup. I had already run into the fencing team and random guys waiting their turn ten or twelve times throughout practice, so I took off sprinting after the ball to try and curb their anger at our interference with their court space. I had twisted my right ankle the previous weekend in a game, straining some of my calf muscles as well. I was leaning heaving on my left leg, and I lunged for the ball. I felt it. My back foot catching on the resin of the basketball court that's so perfect for quick stop and go jump shots, a place I worshipped throughout high school ball.
I felt like my whole leg was sliding in different directions, my knee deciding to make a round trip to my hamstrings. There was a brief flash of some of the most intense pain I've ever felt in my entire life. The doctors say the femur went forward, my shin went back, my ACL snapped clear in half, and my knee dislocated. I laid on the floor of the gym floor in complete silence. In typical Savannah fashion, I began stretching my leg rhythmically. Forward. Back. Left. Right. I. Up. Am. Down. Fine. Hold. And then I had surgery."
This, most simply, is what most people are concerned about. In order to quell their curiosity, I supplanted a story that includes the peaks of what they want to hear: the action. the horror. and most importantly, my optimism. They want to see my story fueled by an aggressive smile, a stretch of the leg that shows gashes and indents but healing most of all. They get their tidbit, I express my positivity about recovery, and on rare occasions, a few souls will ask about my recovery time. "Nine to ten months, just to be sure." I grin extra hard at that part.
It's all part of the play.
I want to tell them, I really do, but the mentality of most, whether they actively or passively express it, is that they simply don't care. They're indifferent to your circumstance. Perhaps its simply the American way, of that I'm somewhat unsure (as most common in Europe, you don't ask unless expecting an honest answer), but I see it in people's eyes. How they smile at me and want me to tell them what they want to hear.
And so I do.
But if I had the chance to tell them another story, I would.
I was in the greatest shape of my entire life. I worshipped the gym, I worshipped the roads I pushed my body on day in and day out, the weights that became extensions of myself, the slight sweat in my palm separating my skin from the cool metal the only reminder that we were not one.
In sprints I was pushing past any pain threshold I ever had before. I broke through walls of days and weeks and months of depression and anxiety and dissatisfaction of the person I was, my body, my identity. I felt a burn in the deepest part of myself, a light I had only felt nearly a year and a half ago.
I was on mile 9 of my first half marathon, the stale air heavy with the breath of the exhausted runners I passed left and right, those who stopped to catch their breath on a steep hill of blistering black asphalt, those who most likely would not begin running again. Their sluggishness made my own time slow, the feeling in my legs numbing as I pushed harder and harder up the incline that took down so many of my competitors. And I felt that light deep inside of me, a third wind or adrenaline or a kick in the ass by God that had me going faster and faster and chill bumps raising on every surface of my skin in the midst of the some of the harshest heat conditions I had ever run in. I found my breath coming easier and flush throughout me, defying bodily function, refreshing my body and my mind and carrying me farther and farther away from the dead zone.
For the first time in a long time, by body and mind were in sync. For the first time in a long time, I felt okay. And I was able to look in the mirror without echoes of my eating disorder creeping in from the edges, I was able to focus better in school, for the first time in my entire life felt in control and satisfied with who I was, what I looked like, and what I was doing. I was happy.
Rugby fueled a large part of this. My decision to rejoin the team stemmed largely from my ability to finally accept myself as both a woman and an athlete, two roles which, while I loved, found came into conflict many times over. My decision to come back was one that took over a year of self-examination and rehabilitation of my mind. It's a fact I don't share with many people. I had to separate myself from something I loved because I couldn't take the pressures and judgments from strangers to the field. I was very passive-aggressive.
The weekend before my injury, I played in a game at Kennesaw State, ironically enough the very first field I played on as a freshman rugger exactly two years prior. Everything felt right. The way I played, how I was running... the tapes show me hunched over every break, coughing up a storm from fighting off the remnants of a sickness that I didn't let affect me. I tore through defensive lines, smashing one girl to the floor, her back barely hitting the astroturf before I shouldered through her tag-along, fighting with every ounce of my being to the try-line. I had a fire within me once again, and I felt it all the time. I was a monster. I was unstoppable. Every insult, every stab about my thighs or my aggression or my looks came crashing down with every play. Everything was right. This was right.
We were practicing indoors because of the rain. I was late, as per usual. And I was pushing harder and faster with every drill. The clock bled red onto the walls to my exhausted eyes, indicating how few minutes we had left of practice. My mind was preoccupied with the assignments I had to turn in before the night's end as we lined up for scrimmaging.
I've thought about the five minutes leading up to my injury thousands of times since the incident. It follows me subconsciously. It stares me in the face whenever I glance down at my legs. It haunts me when I go to sleep, when I have that recurring dream where I'm running through fields and forests and I wake up at 3am and feel the locking sensation in my knee and realize it's not real, none of it's real except the fact that I can hardy bend my leg much less sprint anytime soon, and I sob myself quietly back to sleep before someone can hear me.
When I felt my foot stay behind in that swift lunge, part of me knew immediately. I usually omit the popping sensation from my story, because every fiber of my being fought to forget that part of the incident mere seconds later. Imagine your legs bending in all the wrong ways, like a twisted horror movie when your knee bends inward, everything shifting outside of your control as you come crashing face-first onto the dust-lined floor. I didn't give a shit about the pain I felt. That lasted maybe an eighth of a second. Your ACL doesn't have many nerve endings in it anyway, so I didn't feel it much afterwards either.
What I did feel, however, was an overwhelming choking. It was like my entire spirit, that fire, extinguished, upped and left when it sensed weakness. My mind fought with every ache of my leg, rationalizing knee sprains and ligament sprains as I tried not to hyperventilate. For three minutes I sat on that floor, my mind a continuous string of the ankle rolls and freak accidents as a child I had managed to safely walk away from, my stretching more of something to preoccupy my shaking hands while my heart attempting to free itself from the cage of my chest cavity with its frantic thrusting.
I stood up. I felt nothing. And I took myself back into the game after a light jog. Perhaps a bit swollen, but nothing.
And when my teammate passed me the ball and I immediately cut left I felt it yes I felt it with not just my knee now but with my entire body and my heart and my brain knew it knew something was wrong with how it twisted up and how my kneecap was moving wherever it wanted and how the swelling was encroaching too swiftly for a sprain and when I hit the floor for the second time in those five minutes I knew it was over and I was done and something was very very wrong and for the first time in a long time I felt a prickling sensation in my eyes and realized that I wanted to cry.
I texted my brother that night about how weird my knee felt. And he knew it then too, though he hid it from me. I mentioned the popping noise i heard in a passing message, and he told me to go see a doctor in the morning. Just to see.
The very next morning, I got up early to visit student health, the constant buckling of my knee bringing a slight bile to my throat from anxiety. And she moved my leg around, moved the kneecap, asked me questions and questions and looked at me with these pitying eyes at the end of the appointment that I trusted to tell me I was okay, that I was going to back to normal in no time, and referred me to a sports medicine doctor nearby.
And I wrapped my knee in some crappy ACE bandage, holding myself by a single thread as I grinned at the woman making my appointment. I opened the door to the back garage and felt the crisp February slowly leak into my lungs, though my organs felt frozen to the spot. With one last buckle to my knee, the familiar sensation of my leg caving in on itself, I sat on the ground beside my car and cried. I cursed rugby and school and life and the doctors who wouldn't tell me what was going on and my decisions but most of all my indecision and how I wasted so much time thinking and overanalyzing and never enough time doing and not caring. I cursed myself most of all. I choked out guttural moans of self-pity, hiccups of salt and tears that echoed in the half-empty parking garage that early in the morning.
I drove to the clinic. An older woman sat next to me in the waiting room, eyeing me with those sad eyes I would come to get used to in the next few weeks, blessing my heart as I struggled to grasp the pen in front of me, to write down for what felt like the fifteenth time what was wrong.
After driving home to get an MRI that weekend, I returned to school, a brace providing small amounts of comfort to the anxiety that had begun to consume my life. Everyone stared at me. I could barely walk.
My dad, the president of "put a bandaid on it and keep playing," reassured me in those next few days that it was just a sprained knee. He promised everything was fine. “You’re a strong girl,” he said, “this is nothing.”
The doctor called me as I was sitting alone in my favorite study spot, tucked away in a little corner that no one ever noticed, much less frequented.
I knew immediately from his tone what was wrong. And as that fear I kept locked away and hidden deep, deep down inside me came to fruition I could simultaneously feel my body begin to crumble. I sat down. I said I understood. He told me he was going to get me with the best surgeon in Atlanta. That life wasn’t over for me as an athlete.
“How long am I going to be out?”
“At least nine months.”
I smiled that sickly sweet smile I would soon make my staple, and I hung up the phone.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my entire life. I also never thought my body was capable of producing that many tears.
I first called my father. And I first explained, calmly and clearly, exactly what the doctor said to me. That I needed surgery.
Then I screamed. And I blamed him and I had no awareness or care rather for the people that heard me or saw me be reduced to a lucid mess of emotion and pain. I broke that day. I broke with finality, body and spirit.
And in the midst of these tears and flagrant curses to him and the world for delivering me this fate, he managed to ask if that’s what the doctor really said, as if it wasn’t enough that I told him, as if it were not really possible, as if I would be joking, and I managed to bite my tongue for mere seconds before bursting into tears yet again, our conversation merely my sobs and their echoes on the other end of the line.
In many ways, I don’t think he ever wanted to accept that his daughter, the one that built herself up to be this unbreakably strong and badass character, was capable of falling. I registered his shock and inability to help me as disappointment. As failure. He didn’t even know how to comfort me.
I hung up the phone before he could give me another empty promise, another wish that “things could be worse.” Do you know what it’s like to be feel the most unlike yourself, so different inside and outside you feel as though you hardly recognize yourself, and be told that the pain you’re feeling should be quelled because COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING it’s not as bad as it could be?
It makes you feel very, very small.
My brother gave what he could to me: realistic smidgeons of what the next few months held for me. He strained and then tore his hamstring in football his senior year of high school, an injury that sent recruiters packing and his mind into a very dark, dark place. “It’s more in your head than you would think...”
And I collapsed on the stoop of a building I could hardly see through the faucet I could now call my eyes, wailing that I couldn’t handle it. I had just managed to put my eating disorder behind me. I had just made it through one of the worst depressive episodes I had ever experienced. I had finally felt okay and happy and I wanted to tear my leg off like some sort of animalistic brute, to detach this physical weakness that was seeping energy and life from the rest of my body.
This began the downward spiral.
I made it through the week. I explained to the curious about the freak accident that landed me in this position. I laughed off the pain I felt inside and outside.
I had surgery the week before my spring break. People sent texts of encouragement, wished me good luck. I woke up and couldn’t feel anything below my hip. My parents brought me home.
What I gloss over most, when people care to ask me about how the recovery process is for ACL reconstructive surgery, was those first few days post-op. Your body undergoes this massive trauma, and you really don’t feel it until the numbness fades. You’re lulled into this sense of safety and control, of being okay, and then the pain hits.
I felt it when I got home. I managed to crutch my way the few feet between the garage and parent’s room before being hit with an overwhelming urge to throw up. My leg dragged helplessly along, hindering me as I desperately tried to make it to a bathroom. My mother caught me as I tried to sit down, but in my fainting spell I merely collapsed on the seat. The fan was loud oh so loud and the whirring was making my ears bleed and I begged her to turn it off and yanked my hair in a desperate attempt to distract myself from the overwhelming pain I felt everywhere--in my leg, in my brain, in my weak muscles.
You try and numb the pain in your body and the consequent pain in your mind with medication. I never wanted to stop taking my oxycontin. I instantly faded when I took it, the pills blissing me out to a place where everything was fuzzy and I just slept and slept and slept. And even then, in my special place, I knew that this couldn’t last forever.
You see, when you tear your ACL, the first thing surgeons press for is your immediate physical therapy, absolutely as soon as possible. By day three, I could hardly make it to the bathroom by myself, much less raise my leg however high. I was discouraged by my body’s inability to do what I wanted, and I was confused and angry at the disconnect this limb seemed to feel with the rest of my body.
Nothing was going right. It was the same week as my birthday, an event I couldn’t even fathom. The first time I was allowed to shower, I had to have my mom strip me. I was completely helpless. I was a child.
The water was therapeutic. The constant patter of the drops on my aching scalp and back soothed me momentarily, before I was overcome by nausea. I shut the water off and had to call for my mom to help me. The blackness was encroaching on my sight, and I wanted to cry I was so frustrated with how my body was betraying me. My mom managed to wrap a towel around me as I crutched the few steps to my room, leaning slightly against the dresser as my she asked for two more minutes to finish changing the sheets.
And then I was gone. She said my eyes fluttered back, and I precariously swayed back and forth on my crutches before diving face first toward the floor. She managed to kick out my bad leg from under me, saving it from reinjury. If it had bent, I would have torn my new acl. I woke up in a mess on the floor, in some of the most excruciating pain in my life, rivaling even the times I was impaled by railroad track spikes in my legs and hand. Everything was on fire and I was subconsciously aware that this was the most movement my leg had for days and I needed to get up but I physically couldn’t and I felt trapped on that rug and I felt the tears sliding down my face before I registered the sobs instinctively wracking my chest in response to the pain and my mother somehow managed to throw my body with a strength I never knew she possessed onto the bed and I collapsed into as much of a fetal position as I could manage, stark naked, letting my emotions take complete control, not even sparing my mother a second before I allowed myself to be overcome with self-pity.
I could hear my mother’s heaving from the doorway as she stood and watched me. She didn’t say anything.
My mom, my caretaker, had to return to work after a while. I was left alone with my thoughts, alone with the injury and the circumstances I had begun to hate every second, a pain that never seemed to stop despite the pills and pills and exercise, a burn that faded into an ache that kept me up all night, never allowing me one night’s sleep.
I had to teach myself how to walk again. Every doctor I called in a panic about the lightning that rocketed up my shin every time I pressed the slightest weight on my foot told me to keep going, that eventually my body would get used to the pain. It’s not easy motivating yourself to do anything, especially when you’re injured, when every piece of your soul and being is aching for you to stop, begging and pleading to stop and lay down.
And the second night after this impossible task, my parents came home and asked how my walking was coming. I was quiet. I went to bed. And that night, when the familiar throb of pain returned to my knee like clockwork, I heaved myself upward and crutched to my door, somehow awakening my parents in the process.
They asked me to go back to sleep, begged me to just lay down, that I was going to hurt myself.
And maybe it was my medication, or maybe it was because I was so far gone mentally and physically, but the truth of the words my brother spoke to me on the phone that one afternoon were echoing everywhere and I finally understood but more than anything I saw how much everyone besides me didn’t. They didn’t get it.
I threw the crutches with whatever small strength I could manage across the room. The metal ricocheted off the wall, the pang carrying up to my sister’s room, where her screams of “what the fuck is going on?” were drowned out only by my parent’s shouts for me to calm down. I could barely hear them above my hyperventilating. I didn’t want to hear them. I fell towards the nearest couch, screaming as loud as I could to drown everyone out. For the world to be silent for once.
Everyone finally left me alone.
I survived the next few days solely due to one person, someone who had reached out to me before my surgery, who had been through similar (but worse) circumstances the previous year. It’s different talking to someone who’s been there, who doesn’t say things just to make you feel better, who comforts you in a way of just knowing how it is to feel so utterly unlike yourself and out of control. I felt sane talking to him. I finally felt like what I was feeling didn’t make me crazy.
I never told him, and I downplayed what effect he had in my recovery... but his encouragement and empathy was what allowed me to finally feel like myself again.
School became an impossibility for me. I was consumed with rehabilitation, so focused on getting better and allowing how my knee felt to dictate my mood day in and day out. Some days I would leap out of bed without a creak in my knee, and other times the swelling and the knowing my knee wasn’t well and would never be what it used to be really got to me.
I became perpetually anxious. Stairs terrify me. Every creak, every pop of my knee sends a wave of nausea down my spine, plaguing me until my physical therapist can confirm in person that I didn’t reinjure myself.
Academics fell on the wayside. I became exhausted with rehab, my mind and body consumed with how I wasn’t getting better as quickly as I wanted. I was impossibly unmotivated, and missing so much school continually kept me behind, no matter how much work I did. I was tired, stressed to the extreme. I developed psoriasis a few weeks after this surgery, the basis of which my doctor explained was the extreme amount of physical trauma and emotional stress I had consistently been since the incident. I wasn’t that surprised.
Every single day is a struggle to feel myself again. To not allow this injury to dictate when I feel happy, to feel that there is hope. Talking with those in my physical therapy, my trainers--that helped the most. I have my good days and my terribly awful stay-in-bed-to-avoid-the-world days that have become a norm since this injury. But more than anything, this injury that has had a catastrophic effect on how I live day in and day out and how I see myself has given me so much insight on the aspect of injury never talked about by doctors, by family: anxiety and depression. And how more than anything, this level of injury should require doctors to brace their patients on the psychological rehabilitation just as much, if not more so, than the physical. To tell them that these feelings are normal, and not to be afraid to reach out for help.
An athlete with a naturally competitive mentality needs to know that depression and anxiety aren’t weaknesses. And there should be a support resource in place for those in recovery from the very beginning.