People who know me, and who know my husband know that he is the kind of guy who gives 110% all the time. He doesn't do anything half-assed which explains how he so often finds himself injured.
A few days before Derecho 2012, David played in the company soft ball game. Please allow those words to sink in "company soft ball game". Not major league baseball, not even the minors. When he told me he would be playing I begged him, "Please, please, please, do not hurt yourself."
It's not that I doubt his athleticism. It's exactly the opposite. David spent his entire childhood and a chunk of his adult life both playing competitive sports and dancing and his body is more than a little injury prone as a result. This is the daily battle of his life- wanting to push his body to its limits and his body refusing to play along.
About halfway into David's game I got a call. "Sara, I popped my hamstring. I think I can drive home, but you may have to come get me." Somehow he got himself home and once there he heated, iced and cursed his hamstring. It's not important how the injury happened (sprinted to catch a fly ball), what's important in this story is that he was already injured when he went body surfing at the Jersey Shore.
The Jersey Shore is a fantastic place filled with tattoos, Yankees fans, and funnel cake. It is also the place of David's youth which is probably why he could not resist revisiting his formative years in Jersey's warm waters. It started out great. I sat on the beach while David and the girls rode the waves into the shore. After the previous few days of heat, blackouts, and general chaos I was happy for a chance to relax and ignore my family, which is exactly what I was doing when I heard David yell.
He had just ridden a wave into shore and experienced a serious collision between the planet and his head. He sat up, shook his head a bit and then headed over to me to check for a blood. "Just enough to attract sharks." I assured him and he was back into the water.
The real pain did not come until the next day when in spite of the popped hamstring and having slammed his head into the sand, he decided to swim some laps at the pool, and that my friends is what lead to him waking me up on Saturday morning asking me to take him to the doctor. The laps seemed to have been the final straw, the indignity which caused David's body to completely revolt. His neck muscles went into a complete and unholy spasm.
The doctor examined David and pronounced the neck unbroken (yay!), but the muscles seriously strained. David was prescribed steroids, valium, and vicodin.
"Will the steroids give him roid rage?" I asked.
"Oh no" said the doctor, "the valium will smooth that right out."
And it pretty much has. Now David has to be still and let his muscles heal and make peace with a body which demands more gentle treatment. And valium, lots of valium.
1 comment:
I'm also married to a man that will hurt himself by pushing on too much and doing things he shouldn't when he should be resting instead. Honestly, I get fed up with it. I wish he'd just SIT sometimes. LOL
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