No posts for a long time, so I figured I’d give a quick update. As you know, my physical therapy from the ACL reconstruction in October went very poorly, to the point that 29 weeks out, I still couldn’t comfortably descend stairs. (By comparison, 35 weeks after my first ACL surgery on the right knee […]
No posts for a long time, so I figured I’d give a quick update. As you know, my physical therapy from the ACL reconstruction in October went very poorly, to the point that 29 weeks out, I still couldn’t comfortably descend stairs. (By comparison, 35 weeks after my first ACL surgery on the right knee in 2001, I was already playing baseball with the Reds.) After months of frustrating non-progress, during which we fired my physical therapist for incompetence, my surgeon finally decided to proceed with arthroscopic surgery on Tuesday, May 13th, in an attempt to fix whatever was slowing my rehab down.
I spent the next six days at home *screaming* in pain. The painkillers simply could not keep the pain under control. At one point I was taking twice the recommended dosage of painkillers, and even then, I was still waking up Becky in the middle of the night, screaming in agony. Additionally, I was running a slight fever, so we were worried that the knee might have gotten infected.
I saw my surgeon on Monday (the 19th), and he withdrew some fluid from the knee. There was bleeding in the joint, and that was causing a lot of pressure and causing the excruciating pain and massive swelling. He figured that withdrawing the fluid would fix everything. Instead, the next day the pain was even worse, and my surgeon referred me to the ER. I spent two weeks in the hospital. Two days after being admitted, they got the fluid back from the lab, revealing the presence of bacteria in the joint, meaning that the scope a week before had in fact caused an infection. They scheduled immediate emergency surgery that night to flush the joint and attack the infection.
Friday morning (early morning, some six hours after surgery) constituted three of the worst hours of my life- After the painkillers from the surgery wore off, I blacked out with pain, and don’t remember much. Becky said I was ranting incoherently, saying stuff that just didn’t make ANY sense, and was even speaking in tongues for about three minutes uninterrupted: funny in retrospect, but at the time, really scary. I was running a 103 degree fever and my blood pressure was 179/90, with sweat just pouring off of me in buckets. To make matters worse, someone made a HUGE mistake, and my prescribed painkiller dosage was accidentally decreased by more than 50% post-surgery, when it had barely been sufficient to control the pain before they started monkeying around inside the joint. Becky was BEGGING the physician on call to give me some painkillers, but he kept refusing. It was awful. I literally didn’t open my eyes for 3 hours, the pain was so great, and Becky was so traumatized by it that she was crying about it hours later.
Since that low point, however, things have slowly improved. I spent two weeks in the hospital, including my 29th birthday (at least it wasn’t my 30th.) I’m out of the hospital now, still on crutches and on a lot of painkillers, but I’m slowly putting more and more weight on the left leg. Unfortunately, the systemic infection I suffered required a PICC line, a permanent IV line that allows me to inject IV antibiotics into my arm every eight hours for the next six weeks. This has cancelled my planned summer internship in San Francisco, so instead I’ll spend the summer in Evanston (staying close to my center of care), writing a few cases for professors.
On less of a personal note, I wanted to comment on why baseball is better than basketball. I count myself as a Celtics fan, but I can’t say that I’ve paid my dues with the C’s the way I paid my dues with the Pats and Red Sox. Obviously, with the C’s resurgence, it’s been fun (not to mention a good way to distract myself from the pain while in the hospital) to watch their trip through the playoffs. What’s been incredibly frustrating is watching the officiating, which has been atrocious throughout. I always knew that stars get the calls, that refs get swayed by home fans and give the home team better calls, and that there is a suspicious tendency for big market teams to get calls when it will extend a lucrative series. What I didn’t realize was just how ridiculous it had become.
What’s ironic about these finals is that the league got what it wanted- the two biggest franchises and the greatest rivalry renewed for huge TV ratings- but maybe they should have been careful what they wished for.
Sure, with that Boston/LA rivalry, you get a ton of hype and maybe bring back a lot of fans (like myself) who haven’t paid as much attention to the NBA for a few years. Unfortunately, and I may just be projecting, they’re coming back and remembering why they became disenchanted with the league in the first place- the hilariously one-sided officiating in games 2 and 3, the outrageous protection of stars like Kobe and Bron Bron, the home cooked officiating. With that increased hype comes increased scrutiny, and right in the middle of it drops the turd that is the Donaghy story. Just when the spotlight is brightest, those same fans are getting confirmation that it’s not their imagination; after all, there is an NBA ref who officiated playoff games less than a year ago and is currently facing up to 25 years in federal prison for fixing games. (Not to mention the fact that the FBI informed the NBA that he was under investigation in January and he was STILL selected to referee the finals. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.) To top it all off, immediately before game 3, he makes a statement confirming that precisely such shenanigans occurred in specific games where the officiating was so laughably one-sided that we already expected it.
The best part of all, from a Nixon-fan perspective, is that there are great parallels to Watergate. They didn’t get Nixon for the break-in, or the wiretappings, or the Saturday Night Massacre- they got him for approving the $1 million to get the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation. Here, we have Stern similarly pulling the levers by fining a coach for having the gall to allude to the dirty pool being played!
None of this scrutiny would have happened in a Jazz-Magic series. Be careful what you wish for.