No More Broken Bones

No More Broken Bones One scorching summer I sat in the locker room at Biggersville High School with the rest of my football teammates from East Union. We, the Urchins, have played only one other game as a team. We prepared to head down to the field to warm-up for the second half of the game. We had been losing at this point down by two touchdowns starting off the second half. The first play after kick-off we started on defense. The quarterback snapped the ball and the tight end came rushing right for me. I turned to keep him from blocking me and that is when I herd and felt the pop. When I turned to block this massive kid who looked to old to be in high school anymore my hand managed to get in the way of his facemask and mine. I saw him in my peripheral vision as he came at me full speed. Then the impact was devastating as he put me on the ground. At that time I knew my hand had been crushed. I did not even bother to think about it being broken at this time as I stayed fully focused on coming back in this football game. Pumping hard, my adrenaline made me forget about the terrible pain in my hand. I continued to play the rest of the game with a spiral fracture in my left hand. After a frantic flawless victory in overtime, I walked over to the sideline and pulled off my glove to show my mother and the trainer how swollen my hand had gotten. I thought to myself my hand is an enormous swollen bruise. I said to my mother “my hand is as big as a softball.” Mom and I did not think too much about it until the next day when I went into the doctor for an x-ray. After the x-rays came back in the doctor told me that my fourth metacarpal broke down the middle of the bone in a long spiral from top to bottom like a candy canes’ swirls. I was furious hearing that news thinking to myself that this is it I would never be able to play another down of my favorite sport again. So my mother, knowing how much I love football, took me to a couple more orthopedic clinics around the tupelo area. We found out from one of the orthopedics that we could put a hard cast around my broken hand. I was ecstatic! They also told me I could only play a few more games before they did surgery. They told me I had to have three screws in the bone to hold in place and keep the bone from rotating in my hand and turning my finger backwards. That really shook up my nerves a bit. It is rough playing as a safety with one hand in a cast and knowing that I was going to have surgery on it pretty soon, but I pulled through it and finished my senior year strong averaging fourteen tackles a game. I put all the effort I could into that year knowing that god had given me another chance to play football. Some people only like the sport but I love it. I am looking forward to being able to coach a team of my own in the future and be able to teach them as much as I know about the game.