A SwiftCare clinic in Dublin last Sunday. The game is over. I don’t think my arm is broken, but it’s sore enough to warrant an X-ray, and I’m paying for this health insurance, so I might as well use it once in a while.
I enter, to be greeted by the usual waiting-room scene. Teenagers still in their football gear, knees still dirty. Bored younger siblings dragged along against their will. Parents trying to keep the spirits up.
I’m shuttled seamlessly from waiting room, to triage nurse, to doctor, to X-ray. I live next door to St James’s Hospital, but it made much more sense to drive nearly out of the city limits to come here. It would be nice for every hospital to be like this, but that’s not how it works – not yet, at any rate.
Outside the X-ray room, a son still in his GAA jersey checks the Premier League scores. “Dad! Sheffield United equaliser!” And then, a few minutes later – “Ah balls, dad... Rodri. He only ever scores when they need him.” Dad, meanwhile, is following their GAA club senior team’s progress on Twitter. “They’re four points down at half-time. I don’t know what’s going on there, they were going great guns in the league.”
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The lad who had been plopped in the wheelchair outside at reception arrives in, with one runner on and one runner off. It doesn’t look good for him. In fact, the outlook for his Sunday afternoon is sufficiently bleak for me to be nearly ashamed of my ice pack, draped forlornly over my forearm.
I’m not sure if the man in the wheelchair has a sports injury – maybe, like me, he was under no illusions. Maybe, like me, he said he’d grab some lunch with his three other usable limbs, and only then attend to the stricken appendage on a full stomach.
But there’s no doubt that sport has accounted for quite a few ruined Sunday afternoons in this place today. I wonder do the doctors and nurses here see a glut of sports injuries every Sunday afternoon at about 2.30pm and nudge each other conspiratorially: “Here come the idiots.”
There’s no broken bone to cap off my Sunday misery, but instead I have something called a haematoma, which it turns out is just a fancy word for a bruise. I’ll live to fight another day. I’m given a splint to wear for a week and am sent on my way.
There is, of course, a kind of humiliation in this. When one takes the trouble of getting an X-ray done, there is an onus on oneself to really come up with the goods. It turns out my ego is nearly as bruised as my arm.
The haematoma at least sounds impressive, but I can’t help thinking of Spike Milligan’s final victory, displayed on his headstone in an East Sussex graveyard: “Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.” It was written as Gaeilge, I only found out this week, because the Church of England refused to allow him to have “I told you I was ill” engraved, as he had said for years he would do. Writing it in the language of the country where both of his parents were born was his artful route around the bureaucracy.
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The second I was told that it was only bruising, my arm started to feel a little less sore. Because broken arms, busted ankles and fractured legs hit home a little differently. Pulled muscles are not fun, but they don’t quite give you the shock of fragility that a broken bone does.
All of us in that clinic last Sunday were expert dissemblers, because anyone who plays team sports knows the risks inherent – they’ve seen enough things happen enough times to team-mates and opponents. But it still comes as a genuine shock when it happens to you.
Sport is about trusting your body to do things you’ve trained it and prepared it to do. You can say that muscle tears happen when you’ve overdone the training, or underdone the preparation. But bone breaks and dislocations are nature’s way of telling you you’re just not as invulnerable as you think you are.
Ninety-nine times out of 100 you go in to tackle someone, and nothing happens. The 100th time, you dislocate your shoulder. You did nothing different, you didn’t go in any harder, you didn’t go in with any less commitment. Your body just... let you down.
If we truly knew that equation, and admitted it to ourselves, we would probably stop doing the thing that makes that likelier to happen. Muscle tears land you in physiotherapists’ offices, talking about grades, and pain management, and exercises to strengthen the affected area.
An X-ray is a lot more black-and-white than that: “Someone broke something inside of you, and now you have to let it heal.” There is something far more visceral about that than a torn groin muscle, uncomfortable and all as that might be.
But my poor bones have been given the all-clear. The basic superstructure may be crumbling... but slowly, not quickly. And crumbling, not snapping. That’s all I needed to hear.
