I felt my knee pop when I hit the ground. It wouldn’t bend or straighten. The crowd was screaming excitedly about the goal I just sacrificed my knee for. But I couldn’t move.
The trainers carried me off the field and put me down on the sideline. As I cried they went to get some ice. All I could think about was the pain shooting up my leg from my knee. I knew this injury was going to be more than just a sprain.
While I sat on the sideline, my team began losing. I knew we needed to win this game to make the play-offs. Painfully, I got up and tried to stand, then began to walk, then to run. We won, but at the cost of further hurting my knee. At the end of the game I had to use crutches to get off the field.
Two days later my mom called me when I was at school. She had the doctor’s results for my knee. I had torn my ACL, MCL and Meniscus. I was going to need surgery.
The surgery was scheduled for three weeks later. It took an hour for the nurses to hook me up to an I.V. and get me ready to go into surgery. The doctor put a mask over my face and told me to count to ten. So I counted: one, two… blackness.
The first couple of weeks after the surgery were a pain-filled nightmare. The pain never stopped and the medications only made me feel nauseous. I couldn’t walk, bend or straighten my leg. I felt like I was in prison, and the cell was my living room couch.
After two weeks I was able to leave the house. I began going to lacrosse practices to watch and cheer on my team. The hardest part of having the hurt knee wasn’t dealing with the pain; it was not being able to play lacrosse.
Three months post-surgery I had to start rehabilitation. Working on straightening and bending my knee was the most painful experience of my life. Just four months earlier I could run three miles, now I couldn’t even bend my knee enough to walk properly.
I wanted to quit, and just give up on sports. The pain made me feel like doing something else with my life.
It seemed like my knee would never get better. The trainer would add more weight every time the exercise stopped hurting. I spent all my time either at the rehab center or on the couch icing my knee. It felt boring and pointless.
My thinking changed when I met an elderly lady in the rehab center who was having hip problems. She too had been through a serious injury in high school. The difference was she did quit. She decided the rehab wasn’t worth the sports. She said it was the worst decision of her life.
As she talked to me, she was strung up in a contraption to help her hips. Her lower torso was in a swing device, and her upper back was on the table. The woman’s rehab machine looked as painful as what I was going through. She told me about her high school injury. She said that she had loved sports, but the pain of that injury was too much for her. She gave up on rehab and never played another sport again. She also said if she could go back, she would have pushed through the pain.
I felt as though she knew what I was going through. It seemed that if she helped me to push through, she would feel as if she had pushed through as well.
After hearing her story, I decided I would not make the same mistake. I began to work harder. I asked the doctors to add more weight to my leg. At the end of six months, I was ready to play sports again. My doctor said he had never seen someone bounce back from surgery so fast.
This injury showed me that if you really love something you have to fight for it, no matter how painful. It will be worth in the end.
My first game back in lacrosse was the one of the best games of my life. I played terribly, but it was the most fun game I had ever played. That game was for me, not for my coach or my team or for the win. For the first time I played purely for the love of the game. It was then that I knew if I had given up, I would have lost something I really loved in my life.
-Kirsten Yocke
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