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Scabs. Nature’s Band-Aids. Helps heal damage inflicted on yourself while playing goalie (keeper) in a soccer game.
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Yelling “KEEEEEEP!!!” Which is another way of saying “I’M GOING TO CATCH THE SOCCER BALL NOW, SO IF YOU RUN INTO ME, BE READY TO EARN YOURSELF SOME OF NATURE’S BAND-AIDS!!!”
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Gloves. More specifically, goalie gloves. The material helps me hold onto the ball and also provides cushioning when it hits my hands really hard.
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Dry clothes. There was a pretty good likelihood of rain during the game on Sunday, so packing a bag of dry clothes seemed like a great idea. Change out of wet clothes and into dry ones so I don’t drip all over the floor whenever I enter a building.
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A lack of rain. I don’t get wet, I don’t need dry clothes and I don’t end up covered in little rubber bits from the turf that stick to wet surfaces.
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Folded clothes. I like clean clothes and folding them makes it easier to put them into my dresser drawers. (However, doing that sometimes means I go to bed very late, so I don’t have time to write gratitudes that night…)
Gratitudes 2018, Day 45
GOOOOOOOOOAAALLLLLLL!!!!
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Soccer. Football. Futbol. The beautiful game. I remember once saying that when I die, I want “soccer” to be on my gravestone. I’ve backed away from that idea since then, but I can still picture my body in a wooden boat, people pushing it out into the water, shooting it with flaming arrows and then it’s just me and my soccer gear floating together toward the abyss.
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Dick’s Sporting Goods. Some of my soccer gear is old and worn out and needed to be replaced, so that’s where I’ve bought all my new stuff.
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My new soccer ball. I chose it in part because it was on discount and in part because Adidas made a bunch of new soccer balls for the 2018 World Cup. They were all themed for different countries, so there was one that had “Brazil” printed on it, one that had “Germany” on it… I bought a “United States” ball. You know, the country that failed to qualify to play in the Cup this year? So yeah, the ball was on discount.
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My soccer ball holder with the elastic cord. I have no idea if there’s a technical term to describe it: it’s got some velcro straps that wrap around the soccer ball, which then connects to a long elastic cord with a loop at the end that I can hold. Viola! No more damaging the side of the house or the garage door to practice passing and shooting now!
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Soccer training videos. If I’m gonna fall down the YouTube rabbit hole, I might as well learn something productive while I’m at it. Well, okay, maybe just one more cat video first…
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Mad Dogs. Nope, not talking about Berkley and Sophie starting a rumble. Cities Sports Connection runs year-round recreational leagues for a bunch of sports, including soccer. I played with Mad Dogs for a lot of years and I’m very grateful for all of that time. I also looked at the CSC website and they’re listed in the standings, so who knows? Maybe they’ll accept me back on the team when the fall season starts in a few weeks. Just as long as it doesn’t interfere with my watching cat videos…
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A good way to end the streak
Which isn’t saying much, seeing as how “the streak” is “playing a soccer game on Sunday for four straight weeks.” When I’ll be playing again, I dunno—I’ll be in Chicago next Sunday and going in for surgery the next day. How long that’ll keep me off the field… each injury has varied, so I’m not going to speculate. Suffice it to say that I’m glad that my last game for a while was this one.
It certainly helps that the final score was 4-0, but I felt like I was back to my old self. Sorta. I was panting and wheezing and my chest hurt when I would come off the field, but aside from the lack of endurance, it was good. I was back to playing sweeper—center defender—where I played for years before my knee made it hard to make sharp twists and turns. Today, no such concerns.
I felt comfortable, I felt confident, I enjoyed yelling at my teammates… it was usually about players from the other team who were standing wide open, so one time they were standing around on their own and I started yelling… it was our free kick, so it didn’t matter where they were standing. Oops. (In my defense, when the referee blew the whistle for a hand ball, he pointed toward our end of the field.)
I made some little mistakes here and there, but overall, I’m happy. And now soccer is going to be in the taillights for a little while, but if this was my send-off game or my birthday game or whatever you want to call it… if this was the last one for a few days/weeks/months, I’m okay with that. Which doesn’t change the fact that I’ll keep going to games (even if I’m on crutches) so I can yell at my teammates from the sidelines.
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I fell asleep in the MRI tube again
I guess this story stretches back awhile. Not sure how much of it I may have told before, so I’ll start from the beginning (at least of this chapter).
I was playing soccer after my car accident for a couple weeks (after a short break—I’m not that crazy) and at one point, I was running and felt a sudden flareup in the back of my right knee. Yes, the one that’s surgically repaired. I subbed out of the game immediately and was able to hobble over to the side of the field under my own power, but I was able to do that when I tore my ACL the first time.
That was my big concern: I might have retorn it. Over the next few days, I’d feel pressure against the back of my knee sometimes. Without the ligament, there’s no support to keep it from hyperextending and it felt like that’s what was happening. I scheduled an appointment with the knee specialist as soon as I could and spent the next week being almost positive that I’d need surgery again. Continue reading “I fell asleep in the MRI tube again”
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#madwriting
The title comes from a couple of female scientists on Twitter who… I’m not sure if they had writer’s block or needed inspiration to sit down and write or what—all I know is that they came up with the idea of “#madwriting”, which basically consists of a bunch of people sitting down and writing as much as they can in 30-minute bursts (and they’re very forgiving if you run past that time). In the past, I’d been okay just watching the Twitter updates, seeing the “And….. write!” tweets, etc. This time, I decided to join in, if for no other reason than to say I did it.
There are actually a few good reasons for me to participate. Given that a lot of the people doing this are trying to write papers or theses, I could have used the burst of speed and energy to work on a paper for school. Unfortunately, I don’t have a topic to write about—there was a long list and we were supposed to send the prof a note with our top three choices (plus an alternate or two… as many as we wanted, really). I made my list and sent it to him on Tuesday night. The problem is that I sent it to the wrong e-mail address.
Consequently, he never got the message and I still don’t know what the topic of my paper is. Shit.
But like I said, I wanted to participate. Plus this is a good way for me to not do the reading that’s sitting next to me. What’s one or two hundred pages between friends? A lot to do before Tuesday night, really, but who’s counting?
So since I can’t write about school, what have I got? I dunno, but along with the paper and thesis writers, there are bloggers out there who manage to come up with material for their 30-minute #madwriting session, so I damn well better be able to come up with something.
Hmmm… I suppose I could write about soccer today, but I imagine people are bored with reading about my epic struggles with playing and playing through injuries. I’m not sure why my shoulder is continuing to hurt, but I’ll be seeing a doctor or chiropractor or someone soon. I sent in a form to the insurance company indicating that I would have future expenses, so I imagine my body will be ready for treatment as soon as the insurance is.
But the weird part is that the shoulder bothering me isn’t the one I went to the doctor about—I strained the muscles in my neck and my left rotator cuff. You’d think that was the problem area. All the physical therapy has helped that side heal pretty well; the problem has been my right shoulder. There’s a thick muscle fiber in there that’s just a giant lump and doesn’t want to go away. Consequently, when I try to take long throw-ins, it protests. Loudly.
I made one or two that were fairly short during the game, which wasn’t a big deal. The first and the last… I put a lot of distance on those and came out right away. My shoulder was not pleased. After standing on the sideline for a couple minutes, it felt okay again, but I don’t want that to be a chronic issue. It’s bad enough that I occasionally twist my knee the wrong way and have to step off the field for a bit—I can’t have more parts of me breaking down.
Thankfully, my fingers are still doing okay, so I can sit here in bed with my feet propped up and laptop in my lap, typing away for no good reason with no specific goal in mind. Man, that pisses me off… I wish I’d gotten in touch with the prof earlier so I could be working on a paper.
Then again, this is kind of typical for me. Back at Kenyon as an undergrad, I’d get close to deadlines on papers and find any excuse I could to write someone other than my paper for class. Hell, that’s when I’d be most productive. “I’ve got a 10-page paper due tomorrow afternoon—time to write another essay about absolutely nothing!” Dunno why that’s the case. Maybe it’s because I didn’t like the work very much, didn’t have the focus needed to work on something that took brain power… riiiiight.
But right now, I have reading that I should be doing, so this isn’t that much of a transition. I suppose nowadays, I’d be more likely to surf around on YouTube or Facebook instead of writing—less brainpower required, more entertainment. I suppose that could be part of the issue. More immediate returns for writing fun stuff (it’s fun), whereas doing actual work isn’t as much fun. I don’t enjoy it as much. Especially when the book I’m reading is boring and putting me to sleep.
Why didn’t I get to bed until 5:00 in the morning? Paradigms. It could be intriguing at times, but when the author started making predictions about the future, that’s when I started to fade. When I’m lying down comfortably while trying to read, it becomes less of a “tired head bob” and more of a “tired book flop”. Eventually, I had to give up and start doing some work on here.
Yes, that’s right, I’m still working on the blog. Not so much anymore (see: this entry), but I still have plenty of entries that could use tags, especially in the “Beauty and the Geek” category. I want to break things up into seasons as opposed to just “Beauty and the Geek” and make the readers sift through everything to find stuff. That’s right, I’m doing it all for you.
So I spent time tagging as well as copying and pasting entries into Word files on my laptop. I started doing that many years ago, which came in handy when shawnbakken.com went down and I lost everything. I still had all the entries backed up on my hard drive, so while it took me a long time to finally get everything reposted (see: earlier this month), it got done. Same thing last night/this morning: copy and paste the content so I’d have it available offline. Tag, then write down the entry dates in a Notebook file (which stretches back to 2003). It doesn’t sound that bad until you consider I had to start midway through PerBloWriMo. Half of December plus all of this year… I think I went through 70 entries. Took a couple hours, fried a couple brain cells, didn’t require any reading from Paradigms. Awesome.
And that’s time. 30 minutes of… I might call it blatherings, but I thought “Musings” sounded like a better category title. Regardless, I haven’t the slightest idea of everything I wrote in here. Hopefully, at least some of it makes sense. If not… I could be in trouble for that paper due Tuesday night.
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The circumstances had to be just right
Well, the results of my PT appointment weren’t what I’d hoped, but given the nature of what happened during the game yesterday, it’s not like I had high hopes to begin with.
As soon as I got there, I told Chad (the physical therapist) that I had a question unrelated to my shoulder. He didn’t know about the knee surgery, so the first thing he did was have me lie down and bend my knees so he could pull and push my legs in different directions. The ACL graft and knee structure are about as symmetrical as they can get, which meant there wasn’t an obvious reason for the right one to lock up like it did.
His best guess: When I got hurt, there was a slight tear in my meniscus along with the torn ACL. Since it was slight, the doc didn’t trim anything off since the pad between your knee bones doesn’t grow back. It’s possible that the tiny flap moved in just the right (or wrong) direction to start getting pinched between the bones. As soon as that happened, the muscles locked up to protect it, thus preventing the tear from getting worse as well as allowing my body to tumble to the ground.
It’s a feasible explanation and doesn’t rule out the possibility of a repeat performance. I’m willing to take that chance—something as simple as this isn’t going to keep me off the soccer field—but if my knees become totally symmetrical and both start locking up at random times, Chad may have to come up with a new best guess.
