Lyfe: Ur Doin' It Rong

Check it. Monday night, abouts 8ish PM, I rollerbladed home. Was it dark out? Yes. Should I have been rollerblading then? Probably not. Why was I? Because we had a meeting at work that lasted until 8 and I thought it stupid to carry my skates home.

I hit a tree in a poorly-lit area. Not like my body hit the trunk, but my face hit a branch. When I say "face" I really mean "left cornea." Yup. Cut that guy up a little; hurt like a bitch for days (still does) but I got to wear a sweet eyepatch all week, so it wasn't all bad.

Thursday, last night that is, at Tae Soo Do, for part of second class, we practice dive rolls. Mine aren't strong, but that's why we practice: to improve. My first was alright. My second was alright. My third was wrong. Now, when I say "wrong" I don't mean I made a fool of myself; I mean I came down wrong, landed in a very bad way, and knew instantly that I had hurt something. My best recollection is thus: rather than rolling through, all the kinetic energy in my body came slamming straight into the mat through my back, at the thoracic vertebrae between the shoulderblades. Standing up evoked winces and pain, so I was done diving for the time being.

That constant stabbing sensation went away, but it was replaced by severe soreness in the neck (IN denoting the vertebrae in the center of the neck) and an achey strain on the sides of the front of the throat, just above the collarbones. This morning, hoping I'd managed to have slept it off, I awoke to no reduction of those symptoms, but instead a new friend to join them. Random, non-patterned, stabbing back spasms between my shoulderblades.

Seriously, the word to describe the pain is "blinding."

I spoke to the father unit, who had me do some self-test exercises to assess nerve damage, and it seems I likely haven't injured any nerves or caused any paralysis (I can still move my tongue) but that I have quite likely bruised the bones and the muscles of the vertebrae, probably from cervical all the way to thoracic.

Is there a lesson in all this? Nope. See, I don't believe I was doing anything wrong in either case, and were circumstances different, I'd have made the same call. These were just accidents. Unfortunately, they were both very painful accidents.

I'm getting by, because I don't have a choice. Hopefully the spine will be alright within a week. Could get worse, though. Spinal injuries are. . . to put it mildly, SATAN.

Out.