That Hurt

A month prior to this monstrosity, I was a normal, energetic nineteen year old.  However, one rugby game would proceed to put me in one painful, confusing predicament.  I had withheld a passion for rugby for a couple of years before the accident.  I loved everything about it: the pain, the team work, the highlight tackles.  I loved everything about the sport and the life that went along with playing rugby: the people, the drinking, the dirty playing tricks (dump tackles, trips, cleating opposing players’ ribs in the scrum).  We were engaged in a scrimmage game against the University of Louisiana Lafayette; when I blocked an attempted pop kick by the opposing outside center, I immediately leaped over the downed center and attempted to pounce on the unguarded ball. The ball sat just over the try line.  Five points were up in the air and it was up to me to make sure those points went to my team.  I eyes widened as I tried to take this moment into comprehension, my palms clenched as I prepared to make my dash for the oblong ball, I sprang over Number 11 like a gazelle running from a pride of lions.   With my body exposed and my leg extended, one of those hungry lions fell over that Number 11 and rolled into the side of my knee causing and instant popping sound to echo throughout the field.  The game stopped;  I stopped;  I think I remember my heart stopping for an instant.  there was no doubt in my mind that something went horribly wrong.  I could still walk, but I proceeded to hobble off the field and onto the sidelines.  A group of friends and my father welcomed me as I stumbled to a sad patch of brown-green grass roots.  With one look at me, they knew something was different.  They were used to that laughing, red cheeked, bleeding, excited kid to run off that field; this time they saw a confused, depressed, limping soul plopped miserably on the edge of the field that was so special.  My knee felt like jello immediately after the bone cringing noise, but the lack of cartilage and ligaments was amplified with every step I took from the field to the sideline and the sideline to the emergency room.  Exactly a month later I woke up from possibly the most miserable surgery possible. 

Minute 1:

I try to open my eyes but my body does not seem to be in tune with my brain.  I cannot really function.  I cannot open my eyes, but there is no such thing as darkness here.  Where am I?  My body is cold.  This place is frigid.  So stripped of moisture that my lips are chapped; they must have been like this for a while because they are cracking and sore.  I try to lick my lips; but, once again, my tongue does not want to adhere to my brain’s demands.  I cannot move anything; and, to be honest, I still do not know what happened or why I am in this fluorescent, chilly place.  

Minute 2:

I imagine that things should be functioning now.  My eyelids crease open and two half-moon shaped recessed lights blind them back into submission.  I see pink; that pink color that you notice when lights are so bright that they gleam through your closed eyelids.  This is miserable; I want to see where I am but these lights detain my eyes.  I am a prisoner to these damned tungsten charged globes.  I lick my lips, but the lack of saliva does nothing to soothe my drained, flaky flesh.  I hear voices: some familiar, some not.  My strained attempts at life must have gotten their attention.  My eyes remain the prisoners of those blinding lights, so I am still unknowledgeable of whom these voices belong.  A freezing sensation stings the top of my hand; it begins to seize up my veins as it creeps slowly up my forearm and into my bicep and shoulder; I try to fight the devious liquid but my lifeless body is unable to halt its treacherous journey through my circulatory system.

Minute 3:

My body slowly climbs back to life.  The light is still winning the war with my eyes, but my toes are able to wrestle to cheap quilt back and find their way into the cold: big mistake.  Now my only aspiration is warmth.  Everything in this place is cold: the air, my body, that shit that is slithering through my veins.  This is hell; this is the winter version of hell.  I decide to end all of this and simply fall back into unconsciousness.  Of course, that obnoxious pink hue will not retreat from my eyelids; so that plan is foiled.  I hear a strange voice.  I realize that I am somewhere that I should not be.  Suddenly, like a cloud masking the sun, the brightness of the lights that had tortured me recedes.  The battle is won, and I open my eyes to about half width (as far as I can muster).  A lady in a sea-foam green uniform asks me how I am feeling.  What a bitch of a first question: my lips are bleeding from lack of moisture, my eyes have been captive for the past three minutes, you let some cold shit reek havoc upon my veins, and my toes are damned near frostbitten.  How does she think I am feeling?  I do not respond. 

Minute 4:

I am now semi-conscious and curious.  I want to know whats going on.  After this long slumber, I figure it is time to wake up.  I interlock my fingers and thrust my palms outward.  A sever pain radiates through my hand and nearly feints me back into unconsciousness.  I crack my knuckles and simultaneously rip the intravenous needle out of my hand and stab it back into my knuckle.  This pain shocks me back into life.  This sudden jolt of life then enlightens me to the fact that my knee sits propped up on some type of wedge torture device and in a tourniquet of a brace.  The sensations all bundled into one pain-fest is too much to bear.  Aware of my agony, my mother rushes to my bedside.  This does not exactly aid my pain, but her presence does bring a sense of comfort.  Shooting pains radiate up and down my body.  In absolute misery, I do not know how much of this one human can physically withstand.  

Minute 5:

Realizing how much pain I am actually in now, my first words since awakening beg for pain medication.  My leg feels as though it has been cut off and re-sewn onto my body.  I try to move my right leg, but it will not budge off of the bulky blew wedge that holds the encapsulating brace for my leg in the air.  I try to sit up through the agony and the lady in the uniform pushes me back down, gently.  Another woman rushes into the now hectic room wielding a small white cup.  She places a large pill on my tongue and holds a straw between my chapped lips so I can attempt to swallow a sip of apple juice.  With my mouth being as moisture-less as possible from the hours of mouth breathing and anesthesia, it is a battle to move the pill down my throat; I feel every muscle in my esophagus contract one by one as the pill crawls into my stomach.  My eyelids cease to remain open to the horror scene I am witnessing.  I try to sleep and block out the crippling pain.  Between the remaining anesthetic, the pain block in my knee, the medicine given to me through the intravenous, and the pain pill, I hear the voices assuring my parents that I would be sound asleep again soon.