Every athlete has gone through injuries in their career, whether it’s major or minor. Sometimes you may find yourself asking if things will ever get better. I asked myself these questions for a long time due to all the injuries I have accumulated but none of them hit harder than my most recent one which occurred in the summer of 2018.
It was a very normal summer for me other than the fact that I was transferring schools. I did all my workouts for soccer and everything seemed fine until I started feeling a slight pain in my hip whenever I walked. I thought nothing of it at fist but it soon grew into a serious pain that made it so I couldn’t walk. I did therapy for a month on it, but nothing was helping. It was finally time to go to the doctor to see what was wrong.
My parents and I walked into the office and I was very nervous because I knew something was wrong. The MRI’s (which helps the doctors see muscle damage that x-ray’s can’t see) that I did the day before were reviewed and the doctor came back to my room and told me I had a torn labrum in my hip. According to Mayoclinic.org a labral tear is “the ring of cartilage that follows the outside rim of the socket of your hip joint.” This was bad news because the soccer season was right around the corner and a decision had to be made by me. Would I get the surgery that was needed before or after the season?
I chose to play on an injured hip mainly because they told me it wasn’t going to get any worse. According to Atyourownrisk.org “statistics reveal that 90 percent of student athletes report some sort of sports-related injury. 54 percent of student athletes report they have played while injured.”
The only question was if I could deal with the pains. I dealt with it even though the season did not go the way I wanted it to. It was time to get the surgery and fix my hip.
I can confidently say that sitting in the waiting room before my surgery was the most nervous I’ve ever been in my entire life. Seeing my mother almost cry, I was taken back and it was very difficult for me to watch. All I remember was waving goodbye to my parents as they took me back and the next thing I knew, it was over. According to Healthpages.org, only 17% of patients needed a second surgery after the first so the success rate was very high. Thankfully the surgery went smoothly and there were no issues.
Surprisingly the doctor came back to talk to me and said my labrum wasn’t torn. The issue was I had odd bone growth in the hip that caused rubbing, which was essentially what caused the pain. The doctor said if I didn’t get this surgery done, I would have needed a complete hip replacement later in life. Thankfully everything went smoothly and the therapy that followed really helped. I no longer felt the pain in my hip, and I gained mobility after the surgery. Surgery was one of the scariest experiences I’ve gone through but everything went according to plan and it was over in a blink of the eye. Things may seem negative at the time, but later on in life you may see the good side in what happened just like I did.
