Injured Ninja.

In October, when my leg shot out from under me in taekwondo, I thought it was a sprain…and so did the emergency room doctor.  He said I should be up and running in a few days, give it a couple days of RICE…no, my leg isn’t Japanese - that means Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation…and then start back by getting on a stationary cycle or something.  And I did that, in fact, I took an entire week off of training and gained 5 pounds.  No big deal, I lost it throughout the course of the next week when I started working out again. 

And, I worked out pretty hard around my bum knee for the next 5 weeks…until the ninja and I tested it (because it was feeling strong) by doing some lateral exercises.  I was on my 5th round of squat shuffles when it gave out on me again.  Same sensation of snap-no-control-of-anything-below-my-thigh, but this time I was lucky…I was able to throw my weight back on my good leg and hop to the railing and then sink down to the floor in a puddle of feeling sorry for myself and a reasonable amount of pain.  Again, I did not cry.  Ninjas-in-training don’t cry in front of real ninjas.  Or at least, you wouldn’t be able to see them do it…they are nearly ninjas after all.

After that set back, I took 3 days off to recover…I didn’t need as much time as it wasn’t as bad as the first fall but, it was quite a shock.  I really thought I’d healed.  Recently, someone asked me if I could have one super power, what would it be?  I always say flying, but this time I didn’t.  This time I said REGENERATION.  I am scared of heights, and generally when I fly in my dreams…I end up travelling at unsafe speeds and getting caught up in power lines and such.  Regeneration though, imagine being about to self-heal!  That would be cool.  Of course, when I answered her…I imagined myself having an adamantium skeleton complete with giant knives that protrude out of my knuckles at will, but I digress.  Needless to say, at the moment, I could use me some healing powers…because as I found out last week at the musculoskeletal clinic, my knee is broken.

Maybe 10 days after pop-goes-the-knee-for-the-second-time I went to my doctor and she referred me to a sports medicine specialist, who I then saw last week.  I am able to work out, but it’s a bit more difficult because I’m not able to twist or pivot or pretty much do anything that involves more than moving in a straight line.   At Rebalance MD, I checked in with the MOA, and she gave me an easy peasy background sheet to fill out.  When I say easy peasy, I mean 20 pages of medical history, diagrams of the human body that you annotate and use symbols to point out where it hurts and how much, then there’s the patient info section, the obligatory do you smoke?  Do you drink?  Are you left or right handed (in case the physician wants to know if you’re an analytical thinker or a creative soul)?  I didn’t finish it, I was called into the examination room before I hit page 16.  So, while I waited for Dr. Sports-Medicine-Guy I kept filling it in. 

Explanation of how I got my initial injury:  I went up for a quick kick in taekwondo and my knee felt like it dislocated and then it fell out from under me and I ended up on the floor in a lot of pain (or, not a lot of pain, according to the ninja who will not credit me with a high pain tolerance…even though in 1993 I suffered through 5 days of a broken jaw without realising that it was broken straight through and I’ve had quite a lot of tattoos…which are quite painful despite what macho rockabilly boys will tell you...so there).

Explanation of how I injured myself further:  I was in the middle of a training session, and it was all fine and dandy until the little bugger gave out on me again in much the same way.

The moustachioed physician, Dr. Gershman, looked over my wrap sheet and my file…apparently I have one even though it was my first time seeing him, my reputation precedes me!  Har har.  Anyway, I told him what kind of training I was doing and how much I was doing and then I told him about how much weight I had lost and then he asked me if it was me in the paper at one point…”I knew I recognised you from somewhere.”  That never gets old, I love it!  Finally, I finished the story of my life and how I hurt my knee, and then he asked me some more specific questions and invited me to hop up on the table.  Manipulation of my leg and knee followed.  Everything felt fine until he moved it in a lateral way (or in some way that made me say “OW!”).  Then he pushed something in my knee around…a bit of fluid apparently.  And then he sat on my feet and did a bunch of other things - more extensive tests than I had undergone at emergency.  I sat up, and he told me it was a torn ACL.  The anterior cruciate ligament, dear gods, I have the Pavel Bure injury.  Oh, snap…literally and also just the expression.

Surgery, that’s what I need if I want to do fancy things like move diagonally, pivot, dance, twist, you know…become a ninja.  Seriously?  The only way out of this is to go under the knife?  Can you do a tummy tuck while I’m out on the table?  And give me a boob lift?  Oh!  And take the pins out of my left ankle so that when the vacuum cleaner hits it, I won’t scream bloody murder and fall to the ground sobbing?  So, what’s next?  Hurry up and wait for an MRI…and we’ll see what’s really going on.

FYI, I looked up the surgery on Wikipedia…and nearly threw up.  Bad idea.  Wow, can’t wait to have that done.  Blechhhh!