I haven't written for a while and the reason is because I could not really sit on my ass long enough to compose a post. Two weeks ago, during a perfectly reasonable booty push drill, I landed my first ever derby injury. One minute I was being pushed and the next I was flat on my back of the cement floor of the Carolina Rollergirls Chop Shop. I very nearly blacked out.
Now, many of us have endure the ass cracking here or there... You fly off the end of a slide as a kid and land on your butt, you're drunk and you fall down and go boom. It hurts at the time but you go on with your life.
This was not that.
First, it hurt. If I hadn't been wearing my mouth guard there might have been tooth damage. Then I was almost amused by how much it hurt, like, I remember laughing while Slim Skatey got me an ice pack and kindly told me to roll my ass off the track so they could keep going. Then it was numb. It was so numb I got back up and kept skating. By the time I got in the car for the 40 minute drive home (about an hour after the "event") I had started to suspect I was in trouble.
I dug up an old Vicodin and slept for 13 seconds that night. The next morning I had my every 6 month mole check with my dermatologist (melanoma, holla!) and she looked my copious freckles over and politely told me to get myself to the nearest doctor and get some x-rays. Apparently my general inability to sit, stand, walk, move, lay down, or laugh raised some red flags.
So, I drove myself (on one ass cheek) to Duke and had some x-rays. The male nurse shamed me for being a stay at home mom (I didn't bother to tell him I'm a midwife because I just had a feeling it would not raise his level of respect for me) and had never heard of roller derby. Wtf? Let me go ahead and say that when your sacrum has born the full brunt of your lousy skating it doesn't feel great to lay on the metal x-Ray table. I didn't even bother to worry about radiation, that's how much it hurt.
To end the suspense, my ass is not broken, or at least not really badly broken. Apparently that does not matter because according to the doctor it's going to hurt just as much for just as long. And he was not joking. This pain has been hot, liquid, molten lava pain. Pain worse than childbirth and I am not fucking kidding about that. I swear to glob, my tailbone is pointed the wrong direction now and all I can picture is what I learned in midwifery school about how you can set a broken coccyx by putting a finger in the rectum and two fingers in the vagina and cracking that sucker back into its original location.
Long story short, I have PTSD now. I'm completely terrified of landing on my ass before it's completely healed. And then also after. There is no way I am going back to the open practice until there's not even a hint of pain (when will that be? It still hurts so much) but tonight I got back on skates and I sucked. I'm worried.
