Football Training (Redux)

A couple of days ago I wrote about the torturous process by which my feet are being retrained and restored and rehabilitated. It is actually much worse than that.

In fact, I now know why the process seemed so familiar to me when I first began to go through with it. It's found in Dickson's Dorsai trilogy. All that standing on one foot until fatigue ('footigue'?) kicks in and then the other foot, and so on — the building of physical and psychic endurance through pain.

If I'd gone further down that path, I'd be doing handstands next, to strengthen my wrists.

Delta

Like a river spreading out across its floodplain, my deltoid ligament spreads out across the middle of my foot. It keeps my leg joined in many ways to my foot, and so complex are its attachments that even the anatomists are not agreed on what its components are.

You can damage or hurt it by running downstairs, or landing on uneven surfaces, or dancing vigorously, and in many other ways. But the first two ways are the ways in which I hurt my deltoid, and the pain grew. And grew. It is no ordinary sprain, but something almost existential — for without the deltoid ligament, one cannot put one's best foot forward without some instability resulting.

Painful to Read

Over the last few months, I've been reading personal statements of the kind supposedly designed to get students into prestigious institutions of higher learning. I've noticed a disturbing and painful trend.

In the statements emanating from the College of Wyverns (especially the products of the Ghastly Eloquence Process), I've found rambling, disjointed, badly-focussed, slightly-concussed, irrelevant, self-indulgent, and ill-chosen helpings of thrown-together verbiage. If this were a salad, it would be light on content and poor in presentation. Even if not a salad, it would be that as well.

Why are these students, supposedly more eloquent and compelling and creative than those from the other great high schools of Atlantis, producing such dung-heaps of subliteracy? I suspect it is to do with lack of corrective rigour. If they were my students, I'd whack them up the head with a large blunt object (metaphorically) or slice them to pieces with the red pen that is mightier than any sword.

But it looks like NOBODY has ever attempted to teach them how to write a personal statement, NOBODY has sat down with them to discuss their aims and hopes and ambitions in later life. That is just plain sad, and very painful. The founder of the College, Ankh-Morpork himself, once said that the mission of the College was to prepare its students for 'all their after life' — that is, their life after leaving the school, and not their eternal trajectory.

It looks as if this isn't being done. Perhaps people need reminding about what Career Guidance means. 'Career' means a headlong progression over a constrained course, much as a racing or dressage circuit. 'To guide' means 'to show the way (from the perspective of knowledge)'. If the way is not being shown, how is it guidance?

Cold Shoulder

It's one of those mornings when you wake up and are conscious of the fact that you are comfortable. Then you realise that your body is immobile for a reason: it would hurt too much if you moved.

It was a quarter-century ago that I injured my shoulder. It is payback time now. The joint will ambush me on random mornings, holding my entire body painful hostage to that earlier trauma. It takes a lot of effort to move at all, when you know it can only hurt.

So you summon up the will-power. Or not, if some people are to be believed about the absence of free will. And you get out of bed.

The simple philosophical answer to the question of free will is this: whether I have free will or not, moving that shoulder hurts like hell. If I do not have free will, then the logical consequence is that pain is a necessary phenomenon, and must be endured. Or not. If I do have free will, tough, because I have to get up anyway, if I'm going to do what I want to do.

So it seems that my so-called free-will is circumscribed no matter what. And the shoulder reminds me of that. It mocks me. It makes it hard to think, if I have free will; it makes it hard to think, even if I haven't the will. Ah well.

Asymmetric Haunting

These things come back to haunt you.

I've realised that over the years, every unilateral injury I've ever taken has been on the right side of my body. Shoulder, foot, various ungainly ruptures of connective tissue and integument, either to the right side alone or to both sides.

It's a bit like what they used to call 'warrior wounds', mostly on the non-shield side. The thing they never tell you is that the muscles develop warped, trying to compensate for problems of balance and mobility.

Some of my right neck muscles, for some reason, are about double the diameter of their left neck counterparts. My right shoulder has an annoying habit of moving forward faster than my left shoulder, and my right knee is bigger than my left.

I would never have noticed, actually. One day, though, I was doing stretching exercises on the floor when I realised one reason I couldn't stretch as far in one direction was that one of my legs was about 8 mm longer than the other and the other was chunkier.

Over the years, my back muscles have tried to compensate for the slight skew in posture. As a result, almost all my back pains are on the right side, both upper and lower back. The only time I have no back pains is when I've been relaxing in the water a long time or when I've had a particularly good massage.

Nowadays, when I hear about the injuries people like JJ and Tim have suffered, I feel sorry not because of the immediate trauma, but because I can just imagine what it will be like two decades or more later.

These things never really go away. But the haunting intensifies, as if they keep reminding you, "Hey, you killed us when you were younger; now, you will never be free of us." Sigh.

Capsaicin Cream

When I was little, I used to play amongst the chili plants. My grandmother was an inveterate horticulturist who grew everything ranging from custard-apple to tea roses to sweet pea and orchids, and she dearly loved being self-reliant in the matter of spices and other things (though they were never in enough profusion to please her).

So there I was, helping dearest grandma to pluck chilis, the small little red ones known locally as 'chili padi'. That evening, I felt a most awesome sensation, as if of a thousand red ants slowly working their jaws through the skin on my back. I had inadvertently got the sap or juice of the plant onto my skin. Water did not quench the burn; profuse sweating (incidental and certainly not by choice) did not help. Grandpa recommended milk, which would have helped, but I demurred.

Finally, I chose to endure and survive. It was a close thing. Exhaustion led to sleep, and on waking, I was mostly OK. There was a little side-effect: my migraines for the day stopped, flabbergasted by a superior show of pain. My grandmother, in her usual cup-is-half-full-of-something-else-anyway mode, said, "Lucky not in your eyes." Yes, indeed.

Flash forward another thirty-odd years (or thirty very odd years, if you must), and here I am, with the same chemical substance on my back, deliberately smeared on. It costs $20 a tube, unlike the five cents I would have paid for the chilis at the local market. Why? To combat middle-aged back pain (or the back pains of middle age). I feel the pain bring clarity and an age of enlightenment. Argh. Ah. Aaaaaaaaah. Why didn't I start this earlier?

Pain is sometimes very good.

Deserted

I was walking through the desert on a horse with no name. It felt good to be out of the rain. In the desert, you can't remember your name, and there ain't no one to give you no pain.

Old Injuries

All of you have shoulderblades. The technical term for 'shoulderblade' is scapula, which means 'cloak' in Latin. Place your left hand on your right shoulder. You can feel the top of the shoulderblade, a bony lump where your arm connects. The topmost bony process is called the acromion.

If you feel around it, you will realise that it seems connected to the end of your collarbone. That's a good thing. Your collarbone is also known as the clavicle, which means 'small key' in Latin. The connection you feel is called the acromioclavicular joint. (Anatomical language is a lot like that, and if you want to be a doctor, you'll probably talk like that too.) But it means simply that it is the joint between the acromion and the clavicle.

Seasoned doctors call it the a/c joint, unless they want to impress younger colleagues and medically ignorant friends. Or patients. Yes, patients, which is where this story is heading. Please, be patient.

Here's a very short story. Patient used to play rugby. Accident. Extremely hard impact on the point of the a/c joint. Sudden blackout. Odd thing for the pale blue sky to do, that. It turned purple at the edges, and then black.

Later, one doctor would apply force against the ligaments holding the a/c joint together, just to find out what had happened. He learnt two things: 1) patient is very resistant to pain; and 2) patient had actually separated the two bones of the joint.

The patient learnt two things as well: 1) patient is very resistant to pain and even if not, he would never allow some two-bit torturer the pleasure of hearing him express that; and 2) exactly what patient's immediate maternal ancestor meant when she said, "If you get injured, no more rugby."

Patient took six months to recover. He learnt two very important facts that would stay with him all his life: 1) it is hard to change clothes, sleep, or do many other things with only one mobile arm; and 2) girls can be very kind to an injured boy.

Patient didn't get much out of that season. One bronze medal. Three sets of torn ligaments. 22 years of shoulder pain in cold weather. And the determination to do lots of chin-ups, just to prove that he could.

Later on, the myalgia would balance the nostalgia. He would consider this a blessing. And he would smile each time it hurt, for pain is a reminder of sensation, life, mortality and love.