[Bob Smith]

TOPIC 17: Injuries

freddy wanted me to post this, so i will i suppose. ive had a few injuries over the years, ill post as time allows what they were and how i recovered from them. i guess ill start with the first and probably the worst.

i got shot at close range in the stomach when i was a freshman in high school during a family disagreement. bullet basically exploded on impact, had a couple of holes in my aeorta, 30+ holes in both large and small intestine, liver damage, spleen damage, and other things. a fragment of the bullet also nicked my spinal cord and became lodged in my spinal column and was not able to be surgically removed.

becasue of the spinal cord damage, i was left with numbness in my left leg, mostly the lower leg and the buttocks. also the neural innervation to one head of my hamstring muscle was destroyed, allowing 1/3 of my left hamstring to basically whither away and never return. the innervation to the lower leg muscles which pronate and flex the ankle were also affected, though not as much... but they still dont work completely right.

i got home from the hospital after a few weeks on my back, and spent my meager savings on a home exercise machine, the cheap kind id laugh at someone else if they bought. my first week home from the hospital i busted out half the staples in my stomach straining on the machine bench press... i should mention that i was at this point weighing about 110lbs and probably using all ov about 50lbs of resistance. because of high medical bills already and no prospect of an extra trip to the doctor (we had no insurance) i used duct tape to tape my stomach together. this has always been a problem because of course my abdominal muscles had been cut through in the surgery, and the busted staples allowed them to seperate back apart, and i couldnt properly get them back together with tape. i still have a 2 inch seperateion from my sternum to my dick in my abs, right down the middle from this. it is widest right above the belly button.

anyway, i trained twice a day on the home machine, and was using the stack for all the exericses in the little manual that came with it in a few weeks. not much of a feet, it wasnt much weight.

i had a setback a bit after that, i was due to go back to the hospital and have the rest of the staples taken out, and i was beaten up by a family member, and punched in the side pretty hard. the doctor had originally said that the bullet fragment that had nicked my spinal column was still in contact with it, and i should not do anything that could cause it to shift for several months, after which time he though my body would build upp a bit of scar tissue around it and it would be fine. well apparently the punch caused it to shift, and put it in a place where it irritated something... ever since then i have had a small, burning pain in the small of my back where the fragment is. this pain has been with me for 16 years now, it never gets better or worse, its just like someone is sticking a hot pin in my back, 24/7, 365 days a year. long ago i learned to ignore it, its just a fact of life i cannot change.

anyway, i trained in the house with a vengance, just to get to the point where i could walk again. i didnt want to go back to school till i could walk. i acccomplished this and was able to go back to school and makeup my work and pass my classes. but i walked with a limp and ran with a definate limp. this fact really pissed me off, i had never been interested in running before, but i was mad that now i basically couldnt. i read a lot about strength stuff, and became convinced that doing squats would help the muscles in my bad leg enough that i would be able to run properly.

i ahd no money, but i found a couple of large posts, and used a fence hole digger to dig holes and put the posts in the ground to use for squat stands. my grandfather got me a long piece of metal that passed for a bar, and with some cheap concrete weights, i started squatting. at this point i was very enthusiastic about it and squatted in the morning and at night, pretty much every day. out in the back of the barn, in the dirt, with all my concrete weights and sore legs. i used nails in the fence posts to set the bar on, which worked fine since i was sqsuatting with at most 100lbs. it worked well enough that i got to the point where i could run with only a slight limp, and i began to run every day. i basically wanted to prove i could do it, so the next year, my sophmore year i joined the cross country team, and ran in training for cross country a 5 minute and 19 second mile, and an 11 minute and 20 second 2 mile. i never got to compete becasue i was not good enough, but i proved to myself that i could in fact run, although my foot made a weird flopping noise with every step because of the bad muscles in my lower leg not allowing me to lower my toe on each stride properly. i do in fact still have a very slight limp when i run, not much, but its still there.

i went on to be a pretty good high school athlete, captain of the wrestling team both junior and senior year, and ranked number one in the state in wrestling most of my senior year. a seperated shoulder in the state tournament my senior year prevented a state title, but i did wrestle and beat two national champions while in high school, and was ranked nationaly by USA today in prep wrestling, and pretty heavily recruited for college wrestling.

i sometimes wonder if i would have been as good of a high school athlete without the injury. i actually dont think so. it pissed me off so much to not be able to do things, it kind of lit a fire in me. im not glad it happened, hell its hampered me a bit in everything ive done. try setting up for an 800lb squat when you cant flex your left ankle, or try jumping backwards under a 375lb snatch with the same condition, it is a bitch, but its doable if you really want to. but the fact is, i think thats the thing that really set me on the path towards trying to excell as an athlete... if it would have been easy i dont think id have done it, as weird as that may sound.

and almost dieing gives you a certain perspective, even when you are stupid and 15 years old. kind of makes you want to do something, and not just slide through life. every medical person who came in contact with me during the initial few hours told me they couldnt believe i lived, said they had never seen anyone live with an injury like that. so it kind of woke me up a bit.

one other positive aspect was that it taught me to rely on myself. at a young age i was basically almost killed by the people a person is supposed to be able to trust. this has stuck with me throughout life. since this incident, ive been pretty much a self motivated person, and learned to value myself and my accomplishments by my own standards, which i think is a valuable and good thing. i think my personality would have been a lot different had this not happened, and i like the way i am now so in a way im glad things happened the way they did

i guess freddys desire in my posting this was something to do with thing s not being as bad as they initially seem and overcoming problems and all that, not sure itll have the intended effect, but if anyone wants to hear more ive got plenty.