Second Impact

by David Klass

  I admit I felt a little self-conscious. Our house is nice and reasonably clean, but I’ve seen Carla’s family’s mansion from the outside, and it makes my home sweet home look like a shack. “Be it ever so humble,” I muttered.

  “Get off it,” she said. “This place is great. And so are your parents. I’m a big fan of your mom, except when she’s twisting my leg into knots. And your dad sounds great, too, the way you describe him on your blog.” Carla paused, and looked a little embarrassed. “Hey, Jerry, I hope it’s okay that I kind of invited myself over. Your mom and I were talking during the session, and I happened to mention that my parents are out of town, and she said that your dad was barbecuing chicken tonight…”

  “It’s fine,” I told her. “As long as you don’t blog about it.”

  “No promises,” she warned with a smile. “Everything you say and do may end up posted for the world to read.”

  My father walked in from the kitchen, holding a heaping tray of chicken and some of his home-brewed barbecue sauce. He mixes the stuff up himself, and I can’t tell you exactly what he puts in but it’s smoky and delicious. “Dad, this is Carla Jenson. She’s the one who got me started writing the blogs.”

  “I know who you are,” Dad told her. “I’m a Kendall sports junkie, and I’ve been reading your stuff for years. I’ve seen you at two thousand Kendall sports events.” He extended two fingers from the tray of chicken. “Welcome.”

  Carla poked out her pinky from her right crutch and they shook fingers. “Thanks for reading my stuff.”

  “You write about sports really well,” he told her. “But you need to cover a few track meets. Now I’d better get this chicken on.”

  Dad walked off with his chicken, and we were alone. “Your dad’s a sweet man,” Carla told me.

  “You’re just saying that because he likes your blogs.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m brutally honest about people. Now, would you mind showing me your room?”

  I looked back at her. “My bedroom? Why?”

  “I’m a snoop,” she admitted. “It’s the reporter in me. You can tell everything about a person by their bedroom.”

  I shrugged. “It’s upstairs. There’s no elevator. And, anyway, there’s really not much to see.”

  “Lead on,” Carla said. She followed me up the stairs without complaining, but every step up looked like a painful struggle. She clumped down the hall after me, and I felt self-conscious again. The second floor of our house is small and low-ceilinged—there’s my parents’ room, my room, the bathroom we share, and a tiny study.

  I hesitated at the door. I don’t usually give girls tours of my bedroom. When I led Carla in, my room looked smaller and more cluttered than usual. My bed takes up almost half the space, and then there’s my desk by the one window, with shelves on either side that hold books and trophies. “Wow,” Carla said, “have you won every trophy they’ve given out in our town since kindergarten?”

  “No, I missed a couple of archery and swimming ones,” I told her.

  “These must be your favorite football players?”

  “Quarterbacks,” I explained. “The Gods.” My finger moved down the row of photos. “Joe Namath. Joe Montana. Dan Marino. Peyton Manning. Tom Brady. Eli Manning…”

  But Carla had already moved on to my floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and was scanning titles. “So this is where the unexpected verbal facility comes from?”

  “I have an uncle who collects books. He got me hooked on reading when I was six. Don’t blow my cover.”

  “Too late, jock bookworm. I’m posting it on the Web. Have you actually read Bleak House?”

  “No, I just looked at the pictures,” I teased her back. Then my mom came in and told us she had appetizers and lemonade ready, and we headed downstairs.

  It was one of those cool and beautiful fall nights. My dad’s chicken tasted even better than usual, and the four of us ate enough for ten people. Carla seemed to like my parents and was especially interested in what had led my mom to become a physical therapist. Mom explained how she was the first one in her family to go to college, and that she paid her way through by working long hours at the field house. At first she did grunt work like mop the floors and fill the water bottles, but she soon got to know lots of athletes from different sports.

  “You were probably flirting with them,” Dad suggested.

  “A few of them,” Mom admitted. “I had never been around talented athletes before, and I was fascinated.” She watched them hobble back from practices, sore and injured, to get iced and bandaged. There were two physical therapists on staff, and she watched them and learned from them, and pretty soon she was assisting them.

  “What was it about the college jocks that fascinated you?” Carla asked. “Besides their muscles.”

  “Their competitiveness,” Mom told her. “I liked their swagger. And when they got hurt, I saw how their whole sense of self changed.”

  Carla nodded. “Yeah, I know how that works.” She looked down at the drumstick on her plate and muttered: “One day you think of yourself as a soccer star and your whole world revolves around practices and games, and the next … you’re on crutches, reading about ligament autografts and allografts and thinking that you may never score another goal in your life.”

  There were a few seconds of awkward silence. I should have just changed the subject, but instead I said: “Come on, Carla. Of course you feel that way now. You just had an operation. But I’ve seen you play and I know how good you are. You’ll score lots of goals in college.”

  She looked across the table at me. “No, I won’t,” she said, and there was a warning in her voice that I should have heeded. “I’m not going to play in college.”

  “You can’t possibly decide that now,” I told her. I was trying to make her feel better, but I should have kept my big mouth shut. “Just wait a few months and see how you feel when my mom gets through with you.”

  And just so you don’t think I’m the only clueless one in the family, my mother—who’s a professional—chimed in: “He’s right, Carla. Your surgery went well, and you’re young and strong. All the research shows that after rehab you can return to contact sports and play as hard as ever. It’s true that sports where you need to make fast pivots—like soccer—offer the greatest chance of reinjury, but I’ve worked with fifty-year-old men who return to the soccer field after ACL reconstructions and play another ten or fifteen years.”

  “Some of them,” Carla said.

  “Mom’s point is…” I began, but Dad cut me off.

  I was a little surprised that he took her side, because he’s usually the most gung ho about staying the course and climbing back on the horse after it bucks you off. “I think Carla has the right to decide for herself,” he said. “None of us has walked in her shoes and felt what she’s felt. And I think we all need to respect that.” He spoke softly but with enough quiet authority so that my mom and I got the message.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sorry, Carla, I didn’t mean to push. I just think you’re a great soccer player, and if you enjoy it, you shouldn’t give up and quit too soon.”

  She stood up from the table, and her eyes flashed. “I’m not a quitter, and it’s not about giving up,” she told me in a low but furious voice. “Excuse me. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She headed off to the bathroom, and we looked at each other.

  “Let it alone, Jerry,” my father counseled.

  “Believe me, I will,” I told him. “I really didn’t mean to push.”

  “Of course not,” my mother said, “but your father’s right. This is a very personal decision, especially for young athletes.”

  When Carla returned, we ate some pie and shared some laughs, and gradually the awkwardness went away. Carla stayed till ten, and my mom said she would drive her home.

  I walked next to Carla as she crutched herself to our car. “Hey, Long John Silver, thanks for coming.”

  “Any time you’re having chicken and
pie, invite me back,” she said.

  “Standing invitation,” I told her, and held the door. There was a moment when she was looking at me and I wanted to apologize for calling her a quitter, but I didn’t and the moment passed, and Mom climbed into the driver’s seat.

  So, since I’ve been told that all that happens is fair game for blogs, and everything everybody says can and probably will be posted for the world to read, let me apologize now, Carla, for what I said the other night. I think I was really talking about myself—about how important football is to me and how I could never think of giving it up. Every minute I’m not playing is torture for me, and somehow I put myself in your shoes—your soccer shoes—which wasn’t fair at all.

  I’ve never gone under the knife and I’ve never had my knee bent to restore motion, and I won’t soon forget the sight of you climbing the stairs on crutches, wincing at each step but making it to the top.

  I’m still just getting to know you, but I definitely don’t think you’re a quitter, and I hope you come back soon for some more chicken.

  View 3 reader comments:

  Posted by user ACLSurvivor at 10:25 p.m.

  Jerry, if you haven’t been through this procedure you have no idea what your friend is actually going through. Let her be, and she’ll recover at her own pace. The worst thing for her right now would be to push her body before it’s ready.

  Posted by user DanTheMAN at 10:33 p.m.

  What the hell is Bleak House? Carla, don’t fall for this; I know what this guy reads in his spare time and it mostly involves publications with glossy centerfolds … His dad’s BBQ is pretty damn good, though, I’ll give him that.

  Posted by user PhysicalTherapyAdvocacy at 11:13 p.m.

  Physical therapy is often underappreciated compared to the surgical interventions. Check out my blog Feel Good Get Physical Therapy for more on how this underpaid and often unrecognized profession plays a major role in the recuperation of surgical patients. As always, the surgeons get all the glory but the real heroes here are the PTs. Feel good. Get physical therapy.

  From: Cjenson@kendallhs.edu

  To: JerryQB@kendallhs.edu

  Subject: What your dinner guest was thinking

  * * *

  Jerry, I am sorry I wasn’t the world’s easiest dinner guest last night. But I have a confession to make: it’s all your mom’s fault. She is one fierce physical therapist, as I gather you’ve guessed, but I would bet that professional ethics or whatever probably prevent her from really working on you, even if you get yourself banged up and twisted around on the football field. Here’s the piece I didn’t have the sense to say—after that session with your mom, and then after I made myself climb up and down the stairs in your house so I could scope the place, I was sitting at the table and however much my mouth was saying, “Oh, what good barbecued chicken,” my knee was saying, “Cry, baby, cry,” or sometimes, “Die, baby, die.” It just wasn’t a good moment for me to do the get-right-back-on-the-horse conversation. Sorry, I know I was touchy, but the truth is, when I got up and clopped clumsily off to your bathroom, what I needed to do was break down for a couple of minutes, and it didn’t have too much to do with anything you or your mother had been saying. I mean, I know you’re a jock and you know from pain, but I thought I was a jock and I knew from pain too, and this was something different. Something was wrong inside my knee, right then, and after the physical therapy and the stairs, to be honest, I didn’t really know if I could go on tolerating it and eating my chicken. I held on to the sink in the bathroom and I looked at my face in the mirror and there were tears sliding down my cheeks, and I did this weird silent howl, where I just shrieked at myself but without any sound coming out. I just mouthed the shriek, and then I mouthed the words, over and over, I cannot stand this I cannot stand this I cannot stand this. And after about ten times, I started to relax a little. I swallowed one of my painkillers, and I washed my face with cold water, and I clomped back to the table and ate a little more chicken.

  So I’m usually better company. Sorry, enough about me. Let’s talk about someone else.

  It was nice of your mom to invite me home, and your parents are great, and you can tell they’re proud of you, but I also felt like they were just a little on guard, just a little like they’re watching out over you. Maybe it’s because they didn’t quite know what to make of me. Hey, Jerry, have you ever brought home a girl who clearly wasn’t a girlfriend? Or even one who was? Or maybe it’s what happened last year, when you got into trouble? If I were writing this as some kind of story, that would be a possible structure. You have this kid and he’s the quarterback and he’s a star and it’s all good, and then one night the phone rings and you wonder, Do we really know our kid at all? And then you wonder, Is his whole life wrecked? And you stand by him, but maybe you don’t actually feel safe again.

  Or maybe that’s total nonsense; maybe anyone hanging around with any one of us seniors and our parents would pick up the same vibes. Maybe it’s just about what it’s like to live with one of us right when we’re on the point of leaving and going out into the world. That’s one of the reasons I made you show me your room; I think about how we’re all still living in our childhood rooms. Right now, you can look at them and see something related to the shells which shaped us as we grew. But someone who meets Jerry Downing next year and looks at your college room isn’t necessarily going to see any of that. I mean, you’re obviously unbelievably sentimental in a sort of sweet way, but I would guess that even you are unlikely to cart your elementary school trophies off to college with you.

  I was sorry that I was so out of it with the pain. Just trying to behave like a mildly good guest and paying polite attention to other people was hard for me right then.

  Anyway, thank you for the dinner, Jerry, and please thank your parents.

  Carla

  KNEES OF THE LIVING DEAD

  Posted by user CARLA on November 21 at 10:35 p.m.

  My knee felt a whole lot calmer and better this morning. I took one of the most powerful painkillers at bedtime, the one they had told me would knock me out totally, and it did, although I will swear on anything you say that my knee was throbbing while I was falling asleep, and that if I could remember my druggie dreams from that night, they would be knee-pain dreams. But in the morning, I could manage okay, though I wasn’t looking forward to another physical therapy session. Today was my appointment to interview Dr. Abbot about sports injuries, and I showed up on time, crutches and all, with a slick new tiny digital tape recorder that I got by trading in the present my aunt sent me on my last birthday. (Don’t get me wrong, it was totally sweet of her to send me something so beautiful, more like a piece of jewelry than a watch. My father promised to smooth it over with his sister, and I took the watch back to the fancy watch store at the mall. They gave me cash, not just a store credit, and that’s how I came to have this nifty digital recorder and a pretty good little video camera as well. The complete investigative journalist, that’s me.)

  I knocked on Dr. Abbot’s office door. It was her afternoon for administrative work, she had said, so I was surprised that she was dressed for the operating room, wearing scrubs.

  “I was down in the OR longer than I expected this morning,” she said, “and I was afraid that I wouldn’t get up here in time to meet you.”

  I couldn’t help looking to see if there was any blood or anything gross on her scrubs, but they looked clean and blue, like they were just out of that special hospital laundry, which kills all germs.

  “Besides, why not be comfortable while you’re doing paperwork, right?”

  I sat down in the chair in front of her desk, the same one that I sat in when we were discussing my own surgery, and I thought about how glad I was that this time I was here to discuss something else. I mean, even if we did start with ACL tears, it still wasn’t about me.

  And we did start with ACL tears. She diagrammed the tear for me, just as she had done when she was showing me how the surgery wo
uld work, but this time I could really pay attention. Then she took out her 3-D plastic model of the knee and went over it again with me, the ligaments, the bones, the way that the ACL stabilizes the whole knee. She talked about why girls are at especially high risk for ACL tears.

  “The truth is, no one knows for sure,” she said. “A lot of people think it’s because after puberty boys add muscle and strength more rapidly than girls do. It takes less conditioning to get them strong. It may have something to do with having the strength to stabilize your joints, but also your whole upper body when you’re running, so you don’t find your body swinging to one side or the other, twisting your knee.”

  “So it’s because I’m not strong enough?” I asked. I’ve never loved the weight training we do; I do it, but I do the minimum. Maybe it was my own fault that this happened to me.

  “Maybe it’s strength, maybe it’s hormonal. Some people think that the estrogen in girls’ bodies makes the ligaments a little more lax and that sets you up for these injuries. The bottom line is, no one has proven it’s definitely any one thing, but there’s a lot of belief that a good general conditioning program can reduce the risk.”

  She showed me a study in one of her journals from a couple of years ago. They took more than eight hundred girls who played soccer and gave them a special training program where instead of their usual warm-up, they did agility drills and strength training and something called plyometrics, which involves very fast intense movements. And you know what? When they compared those girls to the ones who didn’t get the special warm-ups, their ACL injuries went down 88 percent over the first year.

  I actually felt a little mad when she explained this. I mean, I never heard of plyometrics, and maybe if I had had a special warm-up, I wouldn’t be in this situation. Still, there was something very cool about the way she talked about surgery, but also something really gross about some of it.