A lot of my friends don't really know what they want to do with their lives, a lot don't even have their majors decided, but that makes a lot of sense...I mean it's my first year in college, there is no need for them to have it all figured out. But then that creates the question, how do I know what I want to do is what I want to do, and why do I know so early?
To answer that, I have to really start, oh, probably 8th grade. I suffered my first sports related injury then. I was playing baseball in the house league and my team was in the world series. It was the second game in the best of 3 series, and we had already lost the first. It must have been either the first or second inning and I was up, and I hit a ball hard to the outfield, definitely something I could turn into a double. I slide into 2nd base feet first and make it safe easily, however I knew right away that something was wrong. My right thumb was in terrible pain. It must have come down and hit the ground too hard, a complete freak accident. I called time, had my coach come over and told him that I knew my thumb was broken. Unfortunately, 2 of our players had already left for their respective summer camps, so we only had 10 players left on the team. My coach decided that were just gonna try and get me back to the dugout asap to figure things out. I end up stealing third on a pass ball, and do the same thing going home, and I end up scoring. Next I grab an icepack and do all I can to numb my thumb. One of my teammate's parents was a nurse and did a quick check on where there was pain and how much and what not. She basically said that as long as I numb it up, and take some ibuprofen (which she happened to have) that I most likely wouldn't do more damage to it by playing (it was my throwing hand, not my glove hand). I kept playing, did well, then later found out it was actually broken pretty badly and was lucky I didn't do more damage.
Fast forward to sophomore year swimming. The day before my birthday we were doing a dryland workout, essentially just a lot of different circuit work, and during one of the sets of clapping push ups I felt a tweak in my shoulder. I sat out the rest of dryland and thought I might be better once I was in the pool. My first stroke in the pool proved me very wrong as I could barely do it. I ended up sitting out the rest of the season for some unknown and undiagnosed injury. I literally had 4 X-rays and 3 different mri's within the next 2 years since it was a pretty constant injury and nothing was ever shown to be wrong. I was in physical therapy to strengthen up my shoulder, but I was still in some level of pain really until last year where one day I just realized that I wasn't in any pain.
Sophomore year also, I hurt my knee in marching band, my doctor believes that it was a viral infection of the bursae because the symptoms aligned with bursitis, however the blood test was negative for bacterial and then one day that pain went away. My first day back in gym after that, I sprained my ankle playing basketball. Total freak accident, I jump up for a rebound and land on someone's foot and sprain it.
Then, like I mentioned earlier, last year when I was running a 10K, I suffered a stress fracture in my 3rd metatarsal of my right foot.
Basically, I have not had a good injury history. (honestly, that's just a small chunk of it all. I have had so many tweaks and bumps over the years, it's hard to remember them all. In fact, my mom nicknames the radiology department of the hospital by me after me because I was there so often).
One might ask then, "why not be a physical therapist? you've had so many injuries, you can help others rehab their own". That would make sense, except why would I want to be reactive when I could be proactive? I think a reason for a lot of injuries that people sustain are because they simply aren't strong enough, or flexible, or have the right level of conditioning. I want to train people to help them to not only be more fit, but also for those who are active, I want to help reduce their probability of sustaining an injury.
Now don't let that fool you into thinking that I don't want to help people get more fit. I am also very interested in that. I mean I have seen myself grow and it amazes me how some hard work can work so much (note: I still have a long way to go, I was just starting from nowhere), and I actually find joy in seeing people go do active for the first time. I mean everyone knows that America has health issues, and if I can even make a little dent in that, that'd be phenomenal.
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