My right leg

On Monday I was working at the warehouse when the ancient cart we were using leapt out of our grip and ran over my right pinky toe. Ryan witnessed the incident and recalled the time that the warehouse elevator tried to break my ankle/heel/achilles tendon. I was fairly positive that I had broken my toe, but continued to press on, working into the evening to accomplish some important warehouse tasks. Tuesday morning I was relieved to find that my toe was neither bruised nor swollen anymore, and barely even hurt anymore. It reminded me of a series of events that occurred ten years ago.

When I was a sophomore in high school I was a three sport athlete. Not that I was any good at these sports, but I played them. In the fall it was football, over the winter I wrestled and during the spring I ran track [middle distance]. Since I was the fourth-string drop defensive end I didn't think it would be a problem if I played a little extracurricular football with my friends on the weekends. On that fateful play I lined up in the backfield as merely a distraction, but the quarterback, an acid-dropper turned marine, decided to hand the ball off to me. I broke up the middle seven or eight yards when Ryan Walters [I forgive you, wherever you are] pulled me down from behind. Unfortunately the lower half of my right leg landed, somehow, underneath the rest of my leg. There was a pretty loud pop. Then a lot of swearing, hopping around and some more swearing. I knew I had hurt my knee, but I didn't know how bad it was. My parents and the head athletic trainer thought it was just a hyperextension, so I sat out a week and a half then got back into practice.

My knee continued to hurt. Not as bad as that first pop, but every once in a while it would pop and send a stinging sensation through my leg. There were certain football drills that I half-assed just so it wouldn't hurt. Then came wrestling season. My practice partner, Chad, can attest to the pops that came from me knee each session. The gentle-hearted guy that he is, he stopped every time and asked if I was okay. Me, I just bit deeper into my mouthgaurd and kept going. What sidelined me from wrestling season that year was not my knee, but my grades. A certain Spanish teacher failed to teach me [and the rest of my class] certain verb types very well and we all did a miserable job on the final, and I finished the semester with a d-minus. Mom gave an ultimatum and I quit wrestling.

I was cleared by my parental authorities to run track, and since I hadn't been that active my knee was feeling alright and ready to go. I was several weeks into practice when the final blow came. I was actually over at a friend's place playing basketball after track practice when I came down on my knee really weird. Weird like, I couldn't straighten my leg out. Yeah, it was bad. The next day I found out that about six months prior I had torn up some cartilage and in coming down awkwardly I had gotten the torn piece of cartilage stuck in the joint, hence not being able to straighten out my leg. The day after that I went under the knife. Orthoscopic surgery is amazing really; within a day or two I was walking around on it. Gingerly, but with some weight on it. I didn't rehab like I should have, I decided not to pursue my dream of playing in the NFL [though the guy at the top of the depth chart now plays there] and actually didn't participate in high school athletics ever again, except as a fan.

I'm reminded of my injury every once in a while. Somedays it's a achy soreness, other times a sudden pop, and other days it feels like a loose hinge about ready to come apart. For the most part it's alright though. It keeps me from doing crazy things like running a marathon. Anyway, that's my right leg, he's a tough 'en. you have my love.