The Curse of Sports Night

I went through quite a memorable ordeal late Monday night and into Tuesday morning, but in all the commotion I forgot to bring a camera along. So the photo below, taken at 4:33 a.m., will have to tell the story of the whole night:


So this is the story all about how I injured my...

1. Left Elbow

After breaking my foot playing basketball at Sports Night eight months ago, I decided to retire from Sports Night. But like Lance Armstrong, Brett Favre, and Michael Jordan, I just couldn't stay away and I recently started attending Sports Night again. I enjoyed a few weeks of injury-free basketball, and I was actually playing pretty decently, too. However, on Monday night during basketball at Sports Night I came up with a steal, raced up the court on a fast break, got bumped pretty hard from behind, and fell smack down onto my left elbow. At the time it didn't feel like I'd done anything too damaging and I even contemplated getting back in the game, but I decided to play it safe and head home.

I spent the next few hours at home with only mild discomfort in my elbow and I planned on waiting until morning to visit the doctor at the Student Health Center. But around midnight my elbow suddenly started throbbing with pain. And I mean throbbing. So I called upon...

2. Seth (The Photographer)

Seth was already in bed when I bellowed at him to take me to the emergency room, but he quickly threw on some clothes and came right out. I also called John McElderry, who lives in the same apartment complex and he came over immediately. It felt like my arm was probably broken, so Seth grabbed an...

3. Ace Bandage

Using the ace bandage, Seth bound my arm to my torso to try to immobilize my elbow. It took about twenty minutes to make it down the three flights of stairs to the car because every time I even slightly shifted my weight from one foot to the other it set off a chain reaction that sent pain shooting straight to my elbow. On the drive to the hospital every bump and crack in the road that even slightly jostled the car caused me great pain, so Seth ended up driving about 7 mph the whole way.

When we got to the ER, the doctors rolled the ace bandage out of the way, into the position seen in the picture. They also gave me an...

4. ER Wristband

During this whole experience, and especially when they were checking me into the ER, I was putting on quite the performance. When I am in pain, I don't cry or scream like a lot of people. Instead, I laugh and laugh and laugh like a madman. I can't stop talking and talking and talking about any random thing that comes into my head because I feel like the second I stop talking or laughing I will start noticing the pain. At the hospital the doctors and staff were all looking at me like a mental patient.

One of the odd things I said/did before leaving my apartment was requesting that Seth and John would feed me some...

5. Great Grains Cereal

I went off on this breathless riff about how I was so excited at the Kroger when I saw Great Grains on sale, but I was really concerned that the beautiful whole pecans pictured on the box would be all crushed and smashed after processing and shipping and everything. Before we left for the hospital, I just wanted to put my mind at ease about the pecans. For some reason it was a huge relief to me that the pecans were, for the most part, intact.

Other ramblings included treating the male nurse that pushed me in the wheelchair to a synopsis of the Full House episode where Stephanie accidentally cuts off Uncle Jesse's mullet, setting off a chain of events that culminates in Jesse breaking both of his arms in a motorcycle crash. After that, Jesse can't even make himself a bowl of cereal, a scenario with which I could suddenly relate because John and Seth had to feed me a handful of dry Great Grains. The nurse dryly told me that he didn't remember the episode and I was so disappointed that I told him that his Full House ignorance lead me to doubt his nursing ability.

I was blurting out so much random stuff in my pain-induced frenzy that I can't possibly remember it all, but John told me afterward that his favorite thing was me talking to the doctors using "the royal we" (à la Louis XIV), telling them that I had earned that right because I was in a lot of pain.

I kept babbling and babbling incessantly until they hooked me up with some Morphine, which is why in the above picture I have an...

6. IV Bandage

The Morphine really calmed me down and made the pain completely vanish. That is, until they wheeled me off to the x-ray room, where they made me contort my arm into many extremely painful positions, such as the...

7. Thumbs-up pose

I expected the x-ray results to come back rather quickly because it was a slow night in the ER, but Seth, John, and I ended up waiting for a couple of hours before the doctor finally showed up. It turns out that they couldn't see any big breaks or fractures on the x-rays, but they suspected that there were some unseen hairline fractures along the head of the radius. They concluded that the main reason I was in so much pain was that my elbow had filled up with so much blood that any sort of movement was putting an intense amount of pressure on all the bones and muscles in my arm. They said that it wasn't necessary to put me in a cast, but that I would need to spend a couple of weeks in a...

8. U of M Sling

While I was relieved to hear that I wouldn't have to wear a cast, I thought to myself, "That's it?!? They're just giving me a lousy sling and that's supposed to make me feel better?!?" But lo and behold, I put the sling on and with my arm supported I suddenly could do many nice little things with greatly reduced pain, such as walking. I also got a prescription for...

9. Vicodin

The final leg of our adventure was a trip to CVS Pharmacy at 4 a.m. to pick up my prescriptions for Vicodin and a stool softener (apparently painkillers really slow down your bowels). We finally arrived back at our apartment at 4:30 a.m., and a few minutes later Seth snapped that picture of me.

I've lived a relatively pain-free life so far so I maybe this doesn't carry a whole lot of weight, but I can honestly say that I experienced more sheer pain on Monday night than any other day in my life. I'm so grateful to Seth and John for being there with me during the whole ordeal, and I owe them big time. And I'm grateful for modern painkillers.

With the Vicodin on my side, I was able to curl up on the Lovesac and sleep until about 12:30 p.m. When I woke up, the maniacal hysteria of the previous night had been replaced by achy gloom. I was stuck wearing my basketball clothes since it was still too painful to move my arm in order to change my shirt or take a shower. So I just lay on the couch all day feeling achy, greasy, and alone. Fortunately, my friend Amy came over later and brought along my old primary caregiver from my whooping cough days: Buffy.

But today (Wednesday) I woke up feeling a lot less pain in my arm and I was finally able to shower and change out of my gross...

10. Tour de Food T-shirt

I went to the orthopedic doctor and he told me that I am healing well and that I only need to stay in the sling for a couple weeks. Plus at the doctor's office they had a bunch of stickers so my sling's all tricked out with Superman, The Incredible Hulk, and Thomas the Tank Engine.

*****

So if you've read this far, I know that you are a true friend and I need you to do me a big favor: A few months from now my arm will be back to normal and I forget all the pain and suffering I have incurred from Sports Night. Please, dear friend, do not let me go back to Sports Night! Don't let me hurt myself again! Remind me of the boot and of the sling. Remind me of The Curse of Sports Night.