The game that is life: My journey with accepting that I’ll not be the very same
Childhood years are one of the most delightful times of ones’ life that they don’t particularly remember. Believing in Magic, Flying Dragons, Santa Claus (Christmas is here), a “normal” post-COVID 19 world seemed like the right and only thing to do. Watching Harry Potter and thinking about attending Hogwarts, even though how ridiculous it sounds, made sense. However, growing up not only changes us physically but mentally as well. Developing a perspective, becoming more mature (what is that exactly?) seems like the natural way of understanding the concept of “growing up” and please, not deviating much but if anyone has a written guide about the mature thing, hit me up!
Gone are the days when we used to run around like kids in the park and suddenly bumped into anything and just after crying for a bit, became normal and “still” continued running! Ahh then comes the teenage life, cocktails of hormones brewing in our growing bodies giving out this feeling of immortality. When we can dare to climb Everest on one leg while closing both our eyes seemed umm “possibly plausible”? Then comes the setbacks, physical and emotional which diminish the screen of immortality, bit by bit until we can see with clarity our mortal self, with all our flaws and strengths, and try to accept ourselves, just the way we are (sing along!)
A person who has broken bones, ligaments, torn muscles; the threshold associated with physical pain has always been on the upper side. As athletes, we always feel invincible. No matter what I had been told, I was convinced that a serious injury would never happen to me. “ Ahh, nothing bad can happen to me, I’m invincible!” Sounds like such a familiar line coming from any Classic Novel or a Children’s bedtime story narrating the protagonist as an ignorant, overconfident person realizing their mistake in the end and hence, giving out a good moral at the end of the story. However, the same doesn’t work in real life.
So, one day while playing football, during the last play of the game, I jumped to intercept a header and while landing, my knee hyperextended to the opposite side of normal rotation, thereby hearing a pop sound. Feeling a quick, sharp pain, I fell to the ground and immediately knew that something happened in my knee. Weirdly, it quickly stopped hurting when I put some ice on it although when I started to walk without some support, my knee suddenly gave up twice or thrice, and being susceptible to sports injuries, this was a new feather in the cap. ;) Not thinking of it as a major thing, I bandaged my knee and drove 14 miles back home. Trying to google about the potential injury that I sustained the whole night, I was surely on the verge of self-declaring myself as a knee specialist.
The next day, the inevitable happened. Went to the doctor and seeing by the looks of my swollen, tangerine sized knee, he was pretty sure that I had torn my ACL. “Well, I guess I have heard that term somewhere hmm,” I thought to myself. “ Is that the same injury that plagued the career of thousands of footballers, most notably the Brazilian Striker Ronaldo. Considered as one of the best strikers of all time, even after making a successful recovery his game was never at the same level that it used to be. Is it the same thing????”
The first day after that happened, I was quite angry with me. Thoughts were running through my head.” Why did I jump and intercepted instead of checking the opponent expecting the ball? Why me? Why now?” I guess a similar set of thoughts come in almost everyone’s mind who has suffered any major injury.
The MRT showed the truth: nothing left of my ACL, plus my LCL seemed to have partly ripped as well. I was bummed out. But then I tried to be calm and focused on what I could control now: finding a short term solution against surgery. (Not a good option, honestly!)
“This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to realize it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Recovery starts with understanding and trying to make peace with the fact that you’re injured. As simple as that. Until there are time machines created and we can go back in time and try to “uninjured” (is that even a word) ourselves, it’s better to accept the truth, rather can creating a nice sci-fi themed movie script in your mind.
The key is to acknowledge how you feel about the injury but do not let the feeling consume you. Rather acknowledge the moment and focus on what you can control right now. Usually, that is visiting the doctor, planning the recovery, and executing it.
