Now A lot of you I know personally who read my blog say they love reading about all the times I hurt myself….while I think its great you read my blog I do question your motives sometimes. I do also note that its always after a hard class I teach that you seem to “Enjoy” reading my blog about hurting myself even more and the hits on the particular posts about my injuries like “how I kick Jackie Chans butt” seem to go up even more after said classes…So I am going to indulge your sadistic side one more time…but with more of a tale of warning than anything else!
Over the years I have managed to hurt myself in ways that even my instructor could not imagine! From broken ankles jogging on ice, to shoulders ripped from sockets doing Judo….From smashing my head into a rock riding down a hill to getting hit by cars…not once but three times! I have broken my nose 14 times, broken almost all my toes, my fingers, ribs and cut off a toe (well almost, it was put back on), and a multitude of other injuries that put me down but not out.
I have to say however the scariest accidents/injuries I have ever had were the bike ride from hell and the fish flop incident. The bike ride from hell of course was when I took my old banana seat bike down Concordia hill in grade 5 and cracked my skull, broke my nose and ended up in the hospital for a few weeks! Not fun! The fish flop incident is what this post is really about however and may serve to explain a few things about some issues you may note when I train…so read carefully!
The Fish Flop Incident!
When I was in High school I used to do Karate full time (like every night) and even snuck in some other sports. I used to do Judo part time (about twice a week), Tried my hand at wrestling but being as small as I was it did not last, and even tried some basketball…but really 5’3” in high school did not make me a slam dunk king…really not a spud webb kind of guy (oh, for gods sake google it!!). Dispite the height and weight issue (being 5’3” till I sprouted in grade 12 to my current 5’6”…I know huge difference…and going from 145.lbs in Grade 10 to a more substantial 185.lbs in grade 12 after hitting the gym) I found one sport that helped me both beef up in the gym and use my size to my advantage…Gymnastics. But it also almost cost me the use of my legs and arms!
Some of you note that my hands shake a lot when trying to keep them steady, this is why…..
What some of you don’t know is that I went to high school for FOUR years…no not the normal THREE and not because I had to…but because I wanted to! And yes it plays into my story….I graduated with my peers after three years in high school and in fact had more credits than I needed. See back in the day you needed 25 credits to graduate…I had 30! I had been on the gymnastics team for three years and some of you (who can see my face book page) will see a picture of me with my best friend and the whole gym team after we won the KCAC championships…I got gold on rights. This was my third year on the team and I loved it.
Literally year round I would bug the gym teachers to set up the rings and floor mats and I would even skip Karate to go train on floors or pick up new skills on the rings, I hate the high bar and the pummel horse was my worst event, my legs were way to thick from Karate training. I had kind of weird affection for Gymnastics back then, I hit the gym to balance out my body, having big legs and small upper body from years of Karate made gymnastics hard in the beginning. I also hated parts of it….like back flips…..my first year I would not try a back flip even with spotters and coaches helping….I simply hated them.
By the third year I was a vet of Gymnastics and could walk from one end of the gym to the other on my hands, My rings were spot on and after two years of hitting the gym and lifting weights till my arms, chest and back were so sore I could do a Iron cross…if not briefly. I also had a killer floor routine because I was so flexible from Karate. And my Gym coach noted that I was the most serious on the team, he said it was something he saw my Karate helped with. I was in my glory…….
After I graduated I looked at what I had done academically and noticed that I had some holes in my plan. I wanted to go to university badly and start studying to be a athletic trainer, physiotherapist or the like and I had almost all the things I needed…but my math and a few other credits were not strong enough…so I went back for a fourth year. The fourth year also did one more thing for me…it gave me another year of going to the gym to work on my gymnastics.
Fourth year gymnastics was great! I had the skills no one else really did, the young guys on the team were super nice because they saw I knew more than them and they wanted to learn. The tumbling was UBER FUN because I had mastered the back hand springs and could tumble across the gym doing flips, care wheels and other kinds of fun stuff…not the Olympic level and really rough compared to them…but I was ten times more knowledgeable than the new guys and that made it fun….and one more thing…I was the older guy on the team that could coach the guys…and girls!
Yup, I was in my teen glory….I would show up and warm up with the team, then while they watched the coach teach basic skills I walked over to the rings and blasted out a few rounds of my routine I had worked on for four years. And every eye was on me! While they were busy learning high bar fundamentals or doing drills for balance I was flinging myself around on the trampoline and having fun. And once and a while I filled in for the gym coaches and showed everyone the drills…and showed off a bit.
After about three months of training and getting to know lots of the grade 10 students from first year and working out with the team I was “the guy” that people went to when they wanted to chat. Being a bit of an introvert my first three years of high school this was very different for me and I was shocked when the girls would flirt with me…that never really happened before…in the gym, I was the guy with the big yellow Walkman on that was to serious to talk to girls and they just avoided me. Before that I was the teacher’s son and they avoided me for that too!
On one occasion I was working out on the high bar and having fun when a girl I had a bit of a crush on came over and started chatting with me. I won’t ever forget that day, and not because of the girl. It was a after school work out and I had missed the bus for Karate so I just ran down to work out at the gym. I had my hands all chalked up and my hand guards on, Chalked up and was just about to jump no the high bar and start working out when the girl came over and we started chatting about gymnastics and the dreaded back flip.
By this time I was very secure in my flipping and decided to show her and advanced and somewhat funnily named flip called a Fish flop! Now a fish flop is normally not to hard, in fact we used to teach it to newbies that could not land on their hands when doing a back flip. You start off the same….bend legs, throw arms down and then launch legs and throw arms up when you arch back…but in place of landing on your hands then throwing your legs down to land on your feet, you basically miss with your hands, land on your chest/torso and roll out to a flat on the floor position. Seems easy enough…I had don’t thousands of them on the floor and they were easier for me than a actual back flip using your hands to catch yourself (normally called a back hand spring).
To be honest, I think I only did a real back flip twice in my life that did not have a trampoline involved, but the back hand spring, well I mastered that in my second and third year of Gymnastics because someone told me I could never do one….so I learned to do it to say “yah, right” to him!
Now the fish flop started off okay, I however made one near fatal mistake……I tried to do it on the crash mat under the high bar. This mat was thicker and less dense than the floor mat, but still not exactly a landing pit in thickness….meaning if you jumped in the air it would comfort your landing but you could still feel the floor threw it.
So I told the girl, “Oh, back flip you should try a fish flop first, here let me show you” or something like that….and I started to do the flip. The start was good, bent my knees, Threw my hands down and started to launch by thrusting my legs hard to the ground….but two things happened that screwed the pooch on this flip…the mat made my feet slip just enough to throw me off balance and this loss of balance meant my arch was pretty much gone!
With a fish flop you throw your arms up and then by your sides when you are half way over, thus when you land you look like a fish, arms by your side head straight and legs pointed. …and it offers little to no protection for your head if you miss the flip…which I did.
I got to the height of the lunge into the air and realized that I had two options, tuck and land on my ass or go for the flip and pray to god I did not land on my head….well ego would not let me land on my ass and God basically looked down and said “yup, you are a moron”! I curved over and basically closed my eyes and prayed!
Instead of landing on my face/chest/torso…I hit the ground with the top of my head. I was bolt upright and had just jumped up in the air and hammered myself, perfectly horizontal, into the less than absorbent mat….totally aligning my spine, shoulders and toes with all of my new found muscular 180 ish pound frame….right into the floor!
My neck did NOT break…a small thank you to the big guy in the sky…but I did do some major damage to my peripheral spinal nerves. I got what we in the business call a stinger or burner! The spine in my neck compressed under the weight of my body landing from about three to four feet in the air and caused the nerves that exit the spine to be pinched. Now I cannot say it was the single most painful injury I have ever had…that distinction goes to the time I was stabbed in the arm pit! But it was a close second!
Within a micro second waves of thoughts and panic washed over me….no longer was the cute young girl in front of me important, I was thinking that I might have a life of Karate and WALKING ON MY OWN taken from me, My head hurt from landing on it….Yah, I know you would think I would be used to it by now….and my arms and upper body was numb! Numb…the single scariest thing you can experience EVER is not feeling or being able to control a body part after an injury! I kind of laid their and played back the injury at a zillion miles an hour in my head! I forgot about the girl who was shocked and stairing at my limp body after the big “GONK” or “THUNK” of pile driving myself into the floor and started to see if I could feel things like my toes…and I could…but my Right hand was numb…and the right arm…and the right side of my neck…my left arm was a bit numb too! I first thought “HOLY CRAP GET ME TO THE HOSPITAL…AMBULANCE…MEDIC…FRIGGIN SHREPA WITH GOOD DIRECTION….HELP” but the panic subsided and the brain took over. You can feel your feet what else can you do?
I slowly rolled over and saw the gym coach was telling me not to move and trying to stabilize my neck…but I could not feel his hands…and my bell was RUNG man! I went to the hospital and they said I was fine, no broken bones and go home….Hate that hospital! I got home and my Mom was PISSED. She was used to me hurting myself but she did not like it much! By the time I had gotten home I cold feel my left side completely, had a head ache and my right side was all pins and needles. I was sent home with pills for pain and told to see my regular doctor. See back then….Medicine was not as evolved as it is a decade later thanks to law suits and wellbeing held accountable for being gigantic morons back then! If I did this now a days, First off I am 40 and a lot bigger than 180, if I could get this old butt to back flip I would be doing them on a regular basis…but if I hurt myself as a 17 year old kid today doing that…it would be MRI’s up the wazzoo till I glowed, back then it was here is a Tylenol call your doc in the morning.
Anyways, by the time I got to my regular doctor…a week later I was pretty much okay. No physio or anything just time. But I had this small shake in my right arm…and I still have it like 25 years (giver or take) later! I did go to my doctor however and he explained some interesting things to me……
The stinger is more common in Impact related sports like Football and Hockey. The injury can be mild and only last a few hours, a bit more serious like mine and have a few years (give or take like 25) and can be misdiagnosed later on or they can be mobility and life threatening. Now opposed to the more serious spinal cord injury this occurs in the nerve after it has exited the spine and can lead to shooting pain, numbness and weakness, but not often in loss (partially or totally) of movement.
The other thing that is scary is that they are not reported as often as spinal cord injuries, not because they are minor but because coaches tell athletes to “walk it off” more often than not. Only a medically trained person should diagnose these injuries and coaches are doing it more to get key players back in the game. Now, it is a fact that most stingers are minor and the symptoms often go away in minutes or hours, but repeated injuries to these nerves can result in permanent damage and the injury may also involve spinal disc injury or spinal bone fractures, so its very important to get a doctor to look at you.
Now I was lucky, I had some major issues with this stinger and I still feel the results of that one fish flop gone bad….I tell all my students and all my Juniors at my instructors club to remember when playing sports like football, ice hockey, field Hockey, rugby, wresting or even sports you would not think of getting injured in like Gymnastics that if you hurt your neck or spine in any way, you don’t pass go you go directly to the hospital! And I NEVER suggest young kids play sports known for impact. Yah, that does not make me popular but it sure keeps the young kids safer if their parents listen.
My experience was scary as hell and I can tell you that I have rarely been scared like that…not about myself at least. I don’t scare easy when it involves my own health or such, I kind of take it as it comes, but this scared me because of the possibility of permanent damage and I still deal with the issues to this day. Its was never noticeable in the past, but lately I have noticed it acting up more and more…Keep safe and protect your neck!
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