Sports Injury Diagnosis
One thing I appreciate about my doctor (other than his ability to prescribe high-powered pain medication when my cornea is scratched by stupid pieces of cheap pressboard that fly directly under the safety goggles I swear I was wearing while I operated that circular saw) is his sense of dramatic timing. This is a man who knows how to deliver news. No hemming and hawing, no sidestepping or tiptoeing around from him.
He just holds up my X-ray and says, “hmph.” Then he sits there all comfortable and relaxed (well, as comfortable and relaxed as a person can be on a 2 foot tall rolling stool) for about three and a half years while I, in my underwear, seated on crinkly paper, am left to imagine all of the possible meanings of that one little vocalization. It’s not even a word. Does it mean, “Here is a pathetic reason for a person to make a doctor appointment… even if he does have a laughably low pain threshold?” Or, “Now that’s something I’ve never seen before?” Or, “Oh lordy, where’s my bone saw?”
Then my doctor looks me in the eye (straight down into the depths of my soul – I cringe) and tells me, “There’s a fracture all right.”
This is not the news I came to hear. There is not supposed to be a fracture. A fracture is the worst possible outcome. And not because of casts or crutches or anything like that. A fracture means that my wife is right. I should not have waited a week to see the doctor. It means that I definitely should not have hobbled around the mall yesterday, or around work the two days before. A fracture means that her shocked look was justified. That I deserve her charitable sympathy. That I am, as she put it when I was lying on the couch with ice on my ankle as it swelled to elephantine proportions and turned the beautiful deep purple of a Maui sunset, “so broken.” It means that playing soccer on Thursday nights with the other slightly chunky 30 plus has-beens and never-wases is, in fact, a dumb idea, and that I need to resign myself to a sensible form of exercise. Lap swimming. Exercycling. Eating corn chips in front of the TV. That’s what it means.
But wait. Here comes my clever doctor with My Dramatic Sports Injury Diagnosis Part II. “However,” he says, “it’s not the fracture I am most worried about.”
Ahh! What? What? What are you most worried about?! What is worse than my broken foot? Cancer of the ankle? Consumption? Bird Flu? Ebola? How can you even tell by looking at an X-ray image? Tell me the bad news, Doctor!
OK, um… so the bad news turned out to be the sprain. And it turned out that (strangely) the fracture didn’t even really count as news at all. It was just the warm-up portion of the doctor patient shtick we were performing.
My fractured bone is apparently an extra one that some people are born with and other people aren’t. I think it’s floating around somewhere by my Achilles tendon. Broken. But it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares because it bears no weight. Its only purpose is to help make a doctor sound smart when he tells his patient what it is called. Something with many syllables, maybe starting with a “g”? I asked my doctor to repeat it four times and I still wasn’t able to get it properly stored in my brain. This was bothering me a lot (I even did some lackluster internet research) until I remembered that I can only name like 12 bones of my skeleton anyway. Why should I worry about this little one nobody else has?
The real bad news was that I had/ have an ankle sprain, a “grade two” or “grade three,” he told me. Which means that when I landed all gracefully and athletically (stupidly and doofusly) my ankle experienced “significant tearing of the ligaments,” making the joint “very loose or unstable” (according to my stapled info sheet).
My doctor presented me with a piece of stretchy plastic bag and a sheet with various ankle exercises that I have been diligently carrying out. My three year-old daughter is copying them and creating some of her own. She pushes against walls and lies on her back with her feet straight up in the air. “Look, Dad, I’m doing my exercises.” She now skips the Strawberry Shortcake Band Aids and heads for the couch to elevate her boo boos.
So anyway, I am not “so broken” thank you very much, beautiful kind wife. I am merely “completely torn” and “very loose and unstable.” Hmph.
One thing I appreciate about my doctor (other than his ability to prescribe high-powered pain medication when my cornea is scratched by stupid pieces of cheap pressboard that fly directly under the safety goggles I swear I was wearing while I operated that circular saw) is his sense of dramatic timing. This is a man who knows how to deliver news. No hemming and hawing, no sidestepping or tiptoeing around from him.
He just holds up my X-ray and says, “hmph.” Then he sits there all comfortable and relaxed (well, as comfortable and relaxed as a person can be on a 2 foot tall rolling stool) for about three and a half years while I, in my underwear, seated on crinkly paper, am left to imagine all of the possible meanings of that one little vocalization. It’s not even a word. Does it mean, “Here is a pathetic reason for a person to make a doctor appointment… even if he does have a laughably low pain threshold?” Or, “Now that’s something I’ve never seen before?” Or, “Oh lordy, where’s my bone saw?”
Then my doctor looks me in the eye (straight down into the depths of my soul – I cringe) and tells me, “There’s a fracture all right.”
This is not the news I came to hear. There is not supposed to be a fracture. A fracture is the worst possible outcome. And not because of casts or crutches or anything like that. A fracture means that my wife is right. I should not have waited a week to see the doctor. It means that I definitely should not have hobbled around the mall yesterday, or around work the two days before. A fracture means that her shocked look was justified. That I deserve her charitable sympathy. That I am, as she put it when I was lying on the couch with ice on my ankle as it swelled to elephantine proportions and turned the beautiful deep purple of a Maui sunset, “so broken.” It means that playing soccer on Thursday nights with the other slightly chunky 30 plus has-beens and never-wases is, in fact, a dumb idea, and that I need to resign myself to a sensible form of exercise. Lap swimming. Exercycling. Eating corn chips in front of the TV. That’s what it means.
But wait. Here comes my clever doctor with My Dramatic Sports Injury Diagnosis Part II. “However,” he says, “it’s not the fracture I am most worried about.”
Ahh! What? What? What are you most worried about?! What is worse than my broken foot? Cancer of the ankle? Consumption? Bird Flu? Ebola? How can you even tell by looking at an X-ray image? Tell me the bad news, Doctor!
OK, um… so the bad news turned out to be the sprain. And it turned out that (strangely) the fracture didn’t even really count as news at all. It was just the warm-up portion of the doctor patient shtick we were performing.
My fractured bone is apparently an extra one that some people are born with and other people aren’t. I think it’s floating around somewhere by my Achilles tendon. Broken. But it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares because it bears no weight. Its only purpose is to help make a doctor sound smart when he tells his patient what it is called. Something with many syllables, maybe starting with a “g”? I asked my doctor to repeat it four times and I still wasn’t able to get it properly stored in my brain. This was bothering me a lot (I even did some lackluster internet research) until I remembered that I can only name like 12 bones of my skeleton anyway. Why should I worry about this little one nobody else has?
The real bad news was that I had/ have an ankle sprain, a “grade two” or “grade three,” he told me. Which means that when I landed all gracefully and athletically (stupidly and doofusly) my ankle experienced “significant tearing of the ligaments,” making the joint “very loose or unstable” (according to my stapled info sheet).
My doctor presented me with a piece of stretchy plastic bag and a sheet with various ankle exercises that I have been diligently carrying out. My three year-old daughter is copying them and creating some of her own. She pushes against walls and lies on her back with her feet straight up in the air. “Look, Dad, I’m doing my exercises.” She now skips the Strawberry Shortcake Band Aids and heads for the couch to elevate her boo boos.
So anyway, I am not “so broken” thank you very much, beautiful kind wife. I am merely “completely torn” and “very loose and unstable.” Hmph.
posted by kyle at 10:50 PM
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