How It Happened

The day that will live in infamy, June 24, 2012.  The old high school alumni Sunday softball league played up at the local park.  The fields have always been shoddy. I played on them as a kid and really nothing much has changed.  Plenty of dips and divots, areas where there's too much dirt or not enough, I guess basically your average Little League field.

Our team played two games that day, in the first we took a beating.  I think the score was 10-0.  It was ugly.  The next game was sure to be better though.  Our competition, a team named Travis and the Chimps was notoriously bad.  We were up probably 8 or 9 runs when I came to bat in maybe the 5th inning.  I hit a single to center field, the player bobbled the ball while fielding it and I decided to go for second base.  I was running hard and it looked like I was going to make it there safely, but as I put the brakes on quickly, my right knee gave out on me.  There was an extremely loud, dull pop and I went down in a heap around second base.  I knew immediately that something was very wrong and I instinctively grabbed my knee.  As players from the other team and teammates began to gather around me to see what had happened.  A person asked me if I wanted to get off the field; I most certainly did.  A couple of guys helped me up, and gave me assistance getting to our team's bench.

It was a hot day, so I parked myself under a tree in the shade.  A few people had extra ice so I bagged some up and began to ice the knee down, still mindlessly hoping that everything would be OK.  Maybe my knee just popped in and out real quick, with no real damage.  That would be great, but obviously it was wishful thinking.  As I sat there a few people walked by and asked how I was doing.  My friend's parents who came to the park to watch the game said that they could hear the pop from where they were sitting.  They were easily over 100 feet from second base where it happened, this can't be good.

Faced with the grim reality that something was seriously wrong, I did what most Sunday softball players would do at a time like this.  I drank.  I had a few at the park, I hobbled to my car, drove up to the bar and had some more there with the team.  It was beginning to get dark, I was beginning to get drunk, and my knee was beginning to swell up.  It was time to go home.  I limped out of the bar and to my car, a frustrated drunken mess.  I made it home safely, continued to ice the knee up and fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up to a grotesquely swollen knee (below) and called into work to tell them what happened.  I couldn't walk, was getting around the house using a baseball bat for a crutch and in quite a bit of pain.  Mentally and physically, that was a rough day for me, more difficult than the day of surgery or the day after.  I went into work the next day on crutches, I went to the doctor soon after and an MRI revealed that I had torn the ACL in my right knee.  I was headed for surgery, there was no way around it.