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Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Tough guy

A little over three weeks ago, on October 8, I was playing a particularly intense game of hockey.  The Capitals were locked in a 0-0 tie with their rivals, the Flatliners, whom they’d tied 4-4 on the opening day of the season.  I’d missed that opening game, but had played the next three, and I was off to a blistering start: nine goals, four assists (and three wins—that’s the important stat, of course, since there’s no “I” in “Capitals”).  Not bad for a 45-year-old man.  After a hat trick in a 6-0 win, one of my twenty-something teammates asked, “what’s with the youth elixir?” “Blood of virgins, my boy,” I replied.  “You can’t beat it with that Red Bull shit of yours.”

And though I didn’t light the lamp against the Flatliners, I helped break the game open in little ways.  There were about twelve minutes left when I backchecked against one of the Flatliners’ faster players, staying between him and the puck deep in our zone and giving our defenseman a little room to start up ice.  This infuriated the guy for some reason, so he squeezed past me and took a run at the defenseman; for this he got two minutes for charging, and as he stormed off the ice indignantly, whined to the ref that he was only retaliating for “interference” from me (a charge of which, I assure you, I was completely innocent).  Then, on the ensuing power play, I took the puck into the Flatliners’ zone wide on the left side and was pursued by another of their better players—who, finding it impossible to strip me of the puck as I came in on net, took my feet out from under me.  Tweet!  Just like that, the Flatliners had two guys in the box, and we had a rare (for our league) five-on-three.  We scored on a scramble in front of the net thirty seconds later; I assisted on the goal.  On my next shift, I sprung my center on a breakaway with a crisp pass off a faceoff, and he converted.  We added a very late goal to make it 3-0.

But when I was taken down on that power-play rush, I hit my head hard.  It was still ringing slightly after the game, so when I got home I took some ibuprofen.  Still, it was a minor injury at most, and hey—I simply took one for the team, because there’s no “I” in “power play.”

The next morning, though, I noticed a very strange thing: my head was fine, but my right hip was all screwy.  I could walk and run OK, but I had no lateral motion with my right leg—or, rather, I had very limited lateral motion with pain.  You know the “getting into car” motion?  Right, well, I couldn’t do that.  I thought that maybe it was a hip pointer or something, but it didn’t seem severe enough for a doctor’s visit.  I decided I would simply take it easy and avoid that week’s Tuesday Night Old Guys’ Game.

And now here comes the critical pivot of the story.

When last we saw Jamie on this blog, he was jumping off diving boards.  But what I didn’t tell you was that since the beginning of the fall semester he’s also ventured into two more new sports:  he’s played three rounds of golf with me, smackin’ the ball with aplomb every tenth or eleventh swing (unlike every other golfer on the planet, he does not get frustrated); more important, he’s started his first karate class.  It’s a Wednesday night Tang Soo Do at the local Y, and it’s something he’s wanted to do for many years, not least because his big brother has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and Jamie has long been fascinated with Nick’s martial-arts prowess.  But as I watched the first class from the sidelines, I thought Jamie seemed kind of lost, and though his instructor was gentle and kind with him, I could tell that when the class broke up into smaller groups, his attention wandered.  So I did the sensible thing: next time around, I signed up for the class and took my place next to him at the back of the class with the neophyte white belts.

The first two classes went well.  Jamie approached the kicks and the forms with the same dedication he’d been giving to his golf game, practicing again and again with great patience.  At the end of our second class he’d learned form one, which involves all kinds of low blocks, spins, straight punches, and forward kicks; form two involves the same motions but with high blocks, high punches, and side kicks.  The class starts off with 75 jumping jacks and lots of calisthenics, some of which Jamie can do, some of which he can’t.  But his spirit, as they say in the business, is indomitable.  “If we keep working hard,” I told him after the second class, “we can take the test to become orange belts.”

“Michael,” he replied dismissively, “I’m gonna be a black belt.”

“Wow!” I said.  “OK, that’ll take a lot of work, and a couple of years.  It took Nick five or six years, you know.” He nodded.

But after my little hip injury, I wasn’t sure I was up for 90 minutes of kicking and flailing up and down a basketball court, and I told Jamie I might have to skip the class.  “You will not have to skip the class!” he insisted.  “You can do it!”

How could I refuse?  I promised him I would do my best.

And so it happened that I was making my way downcourt at 8:30 pm three weeks ago today, doing the weakest little side kicks you ever did see, with my tender right leg lifting my foot only about eight inches off the floor.  Then we were told to do back kicks, which Jamie and I hadn’t really learned yet; for these we would have to take a half-step back, pivot, and kick with our heel to the ceiling and our back to our “opponent.” I winced audibly on the first few, and then, to my right, I heard a crash.  Jamie had wiped out.

At first I thought he’d simply spun a bit too much on the pivot and lost his balance.  But he was splayed on the court with his right leg fully extended, and he said, in an oddly broken voice, “my knee.”

The knee in question was very ugly: the patella had somehow slid off to the right side of the leg, and the little hollow left in its place was getting purple fast.  He had dislocated his knee.  Badly.

I immediately did something I would never have done if I’d had time to think: I rushed to his side, held his leg carefully, and popped the patella back into place.  Because I remembered that Jamie’s mother, the elusive and mysterious and scarily double-jointed Janet Lyon, had dislocated her knee twenty years earlier.  Of course, she’d done it while doing the limbo, and of course, she’d done it while doing the limbo when the bar was about eighteen inches off the floor, because she is really, really scarily double-jointed.  But still.  Jamie’s leg looked terrible; it looked like Janet’s leg; Janet had dislocated her knee at a party thrown by her fellow nurses; one of the nurses had popped her patella back into place and placed a bag of ice on it; so without further ado, I popped Jamie’s patella back into place. 

The class came to a halt, of course, while I was doing this, and the instructor helped me walk Jamie gingerly over to the stands, making sure he didn’t place any weight on his right leg.  Someone else got a bag of ice from the Y bag-of-ice stash.  I told Jamie we were done for the night and were going home, perhaps going to the hospital . . . and he was more upset about this than about anything else.

Because, you know, my Jamie does not cry.  He does not scream.  When he is in great pain—say, when his kneecap suddenly slides from the front of his leg to the side—he speaks in a strange little voice and he says, “my knee—I broke my knee.” That is all.  Then he gets angry.  Whether at the pain or at the fuss or at his father telling him he was done for the night, I do not know.  But I told him his knee was not, in fact, broken.  It had just been—a new word—dislocated.  In the wrong place.

The instructor and I took him to the locker room and got his things together.  I let the instructor know that Jamie’s mother is a former R.N. and would take over with him the minute I got him home, but that for now there was no reason to call an ambulance.  And that as far as future classes went, we would just play it by ear.  (He called over the next weekend to check in on Jamie.  That was very kind, I thought.)

When I got Jamie home a few minutes later, Janet was first surprised at our early arrival and then horrified, not least because she remembered very well how much her own dislocation had hurt.  We sat Jamie down on the couch and made him comfortable and watched some TV while keeping his leg up and iced.  Janet told me that she’d recently seen Jamie popping his knee out slightly: apparently he could do it at will, and she’d warned him that it was a dangerous thing to do and he shouldn’t be doing it.  But, she added, the sight had filled her with dread, because Jamie’s loose-jointedness was precisely like her own loose-jointedness, and she’d begun to worry that it might cause problems for him down the road.  And here we were, already down that road.

Jamie, meanwhile, was feeling much better.  He was still a little tentative, and seemed a little worried that his knee could really go that far out of joint, but he wasn’t in any pain at all.  Janet turned to me and gave me the highest praise in her lexicon: you did exactly the right thing. Yes, well.  It has occurred to me often in the past three weeks that if I’d somehow made things worse by trying to replace the patella on the spot, I could have given Jamie a very serious injury.  It is, perhaps, a good thing that I was not entirely sure what I was doing.

Jamie is just fine now, though he’s (understandably) a bit more protective about the knee. We ask him how it is, and he says it’s OK, and he is not impatient with our asking him, day after day.  Amazingly, he didn’t miss his Tang Soo Do classes on October 18 or 25, and he’s going again tonight, whereas I missed last week (too busy) and will miss this one (traveling).  Janet wrapped him up in a knee brace and Ace bandage two weeks ago, and just the brace last week.  We spoke to the instructor and we’re all on the same page: for now, no jumping jacks, no hyperextensions, and very gentle side and back kicks.  More or less the kind of E-Z kicking I’d been doing when Jamie went down.  But the funny thing is that while it took me a week and a half to recover from my wussy little hip injury (and of course I haven’t played my weekend games since October 14, because of all this traveling about), Jamie hasn’t missed a step.  Because, you know, he’s really one tough guy.

Posted by Michael on 11/01 at 04:34 PM
Jamie • (22) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
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