13. Surgery Upon Surgery, Pain Upon Pain

A couple posts ago, I posted about the worst luck that I've ever had in basketball. Indeed my luck was awful, and yes it was quite a horrible experience, but in the end, it turned out that it extended even further than I described. For the first few months after the injury, I often questioned to myself, "Why would something so terrible happen to me?" I even thought things like, "This stupid injury ruined my entire life!" 

A couple days after my injury, I was able to go in to the doctor's office and figure out what exactly I did to myself. My trainer had said that the injury was a tear to the meniscus. She was only slightly right. There was much more to it than that. It turned out that I tore my meniscus, MCL, FCL, LCL, and a chunk of cartilage off of my femur, about the size of a quarter. I would undoubtably need surgery. This became scheduled for the same day as my end of season basketball banquet. 

March 17th, 18 days after my injury, I finally got surgery. The process they underwent was this: they cleaned out all of the floating garbage in-between my kneecap and the bone behind it, then they transferred a piece of cartilage from the upper-left part of my knee to the place that it was torn off. They did all of this in a matter of two hours. When I finally woke up from the anesthesia, I felt like a million bucks. My left leg (the one that was injured) felt like it had been extended and everything else felt tingly due to the Percocet that they had given me for the pain. 

By the time I finally got home, I felt awful. I needed to puke; I never felt so sick in my entire life. Every time that I was on the Percocet, I became nauseous which I personally thought was worse than just dealing with the pain in my knee, so I stopped taking it. Eight days later, I was scheduled to get my wisdom teeth taken out. When I finally went through that, I once again felt like Superman. I felt like I could fly! I was so loopy after this dose of anesthesia that my parents decided to record every embarrassing word that I said. 

A couple hours after I got home, the pain hit me. All four of my wisdom teeth had developed four roots each. That means they had to dig down deeper than they do for most wisdom teeth removal surgeries. It felt like the holes in my mouth went to the back of my head. The pain grew slowly and slowly until I couldn't bear it anymore. The ibuprofen that they had given me wasn't doing enough. I grabbed the medicine off my desk and popped a Percocet into my mouth. That was the worst thing I could have done. 

When I swallowed the drugs, my body couldn't take it anymore. The excruciating pain enveloped my whole body. The pain from my mouth reached around my whole head, the pain in my knee grew down to my toes and up to my chest. My fingers began to tingle and my stomach began to tremble. The medicine didn't help the pain at all, but rather it made me feel more sick than I had ever felt in my entire life. Every inch of my body hurt to the marrow of my bones. Eventually the pain calmed down enough to breath normally, but needless to say, I never took another Percocet. The pain upon pain that it brought just was not worth it.