GET OFF MY LAWN, YOU HOOLIGANS.

It's November and it is cold.  Mostly I like cold weather, but one aspect of it that I could do without is the fact that it makes my right knee ache like an old person's.

This pain comes from my freshman year of high school, when I hurt my knee playing basketball and had to have surgery.

When I played basketball in high school, I was a super duper shot-blocker.  This may sound like bragging.  That’s because it is.  It’s okay, though, because I’ll also freely admit that I was pretty near useless on offense.  I could shoot the ball well enough when I was by myself, but in an actual game I almost always panicked whenever the ball was in my hands.

BUT!  Back to what I’m good at!  As a kid I played in a league that had the specific rule that you were not allowed to block shots.  You were supposed to stand between the basket and the kid you were guarding with your arms straight up in the air.  You weren’t allowed to swing down and I’m pretty sure you weren’t even supposed to jump.  I think the grown ups in charge didn’t want any kids getting discouraged by having their shots swatted away all the time, and they were probably also trying to cut down on children being smashed in the face by an over-zealous defense.  Playing this way weirdly taught me how to block shots better because I learned how to get in the way just enough to mess with people’s shooting abilities without fouling all the time.

Plus I have the arm span of a pterodactyl, which helped more than a bit.

Aaaanyway, I tell you about my shot-blocking abilities mostly just because I’m a braggart, since it is only veeeeeeeery loosely related to how I hurt my knee.

It’s seriously the least impressive story of a sports injury ever.  It was during a scrimmage (and it wasn’t even a real scrimmage.  It was me and four other freshmen on a half court, playing two-on-two and swapping in the fifth player every made basket).

I was on defense.

I leapt into the air to block a shot.

My knee snapped straight much much much too sharply and a flash of “AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!” ripped through me.

I landed (very luckily on my left foot, otherwise I would almost certainly have crumpled onto the court in a pile of ouch) and hobbled over to the coach, who I told that I really really wanted to go home.

I didn’t even block the shot.

My mom took me to a doctor who had us make an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon, so I was walking around on my busted knee for a few weeks or so before getting it taken care of.  During that time my leg went through a couple of different stages of hurt.

First my knee mostly just felt a little weak, except that every once in a while it would simply buckle under my weight and a burst of the most painy pain I’ve ever felt would shoot through my leg.  

I believe it might even have been worse than a paper cut.

After a few days of these sneak attacks of hurt, I resorted to simply walking with my leg completely straight.  It would only do its weird buckling thing when it was bent, so I locked my knee and wobbled around like a pirate with a peg leg.  This worked pretty well until the day I woke up unable to straighten my knee all the way.  My leg would get almost there, and then would hit some sort of hurty blockage and would go no further.  So then I had to limp along with one leg bent, like a pirate who had jumped into the air too enthusiastically during a basketball scrimmage and now walked with a limp.  

Pretty soon after this development, we went to see the orthopedic surgeon, who discovered that I had somehow managed to break off a few fragments of bone in my knee.  This bone was now floating around without a care in the world, presumably tearing its way through my cartilage along the way.

I had to have surgery to remove the bone chips, stopping them from doing any more damage.  I was told I’d be on crutches for a few weeks (partly bummer, partly cool because I’d never broken a bone before and secretly thought crutches would be super fun), and also that I’d probably not be able to play basketball anymore, since my cartilage was most likely pretty chewed up.  Once the bone fragments were removed, I’d also be left with a good sized hole in my bone, and the doctor informed me that bones with holes in them ought not to be run with (ALL BUMMER AND NO COOL).

I’m sure my surgery was very suspenseful and exciting, just like all the ones on TV, but I slept through the whole thing (would you believe it!?), so I’ll just have to give you the main points:

My surgery was supposed to take 1.5 hours.

Instead it took 3.

The doctor took one peek inside my knee and was all, “OH WAIT.”

(But don’t worry!  It was one of those rare good OH WAITs.)

He was like, “OH WAIT. These bone chips are still connected to some ligaments.”

This was good for a few reasons:

1.  The little bone chips were still alive.

2.  The fragments hadn’t been able to move freely throughout my knee, so the cartilage was in much much better condition than expected.

3.  Because of numbers 1 and 2, these pieces of bone could be fit back in place like a really icky jigsaw puzzle.

Which is what the good doctor did.

So I was on crutches for the whole summer instead of only a few weeks, but I also didn’t have a gaping hole in my knee, which was definitely a plus because it meant I would be able to keep playing basketball.

Three months later I was off crutches, but still super not ready for the running and jumping that is integral to the sport.  This was a pesky time for me.  I couldn’t play yet, but I could do a bunch of leg-strengthening exercises, which included me pulling myself around the gym on an old creaky office chair with a missing wheel, using only my weak leg.  

I HATED THAT OFFICE CHAIR WITH THE FIRE OF A THOUSAND STRIKE ANYWHERE MATCHES. 

I also spent a lot of time doing lunges back and forth across the gym.  I also hate lunges, but probably only with the fire of one small BIC lighter.  Some of the freshmen thought I was being punished, since I wasn’t allowed to play with the rest of the girls, and so I had to explain (a few words at a time as I lunged past their lay-up practices) that NO, I wasn’t in trouble.  I was just BROKEN.  

NOW.  Back to my favorite pastime:  bragging.

The first game after my surgery that I was allowed to play in, I blocked seven shots.  This was mostly because I was so excited that I was being allowed to run around again that I went a little bit crazy and simply DID NOT ALLOW MYSELF TO STOP.  I only got to play because for some reason the JV team had been scheduled for two games at the same time that day.  Poor planning, perhaps, but it ended up working out really well for me because it meant that our team had to be split in half and only 6 girls (including me) went to one of the games.  And that meant that either those other five girls were going to have to play the entire game with no substitutions, or I WAS FINALLY GOING TO GET PUT IN.  The game started and I sat excitedly on the bench, just waiting for someone to get winded (I’m nothing if not a team player).  FINALLY someone got tired, and I was sent in to give her a short break.  

I hadn’t really run in over four months, and I felt like I was going to barf or fall down most of the game, but I was so very very happy to be playing again that I just KEPT GOING, like the Energizer Bunny if the Energizer Bunny had a slight limp.  The coach was apparently impressed with my maniacal enthusiasm, so he let me play the whole rest of the game.

Aaaaaanyway, the whole ordeal was a pain (LITERALLY! BAH!) and it’s still annoying when the rain starts a-raining and my knee starts a-aching, BUT it did make for an excellent college entrance essay.

And who could ask for more than that?