Good Old Groin Injury
May 4, 2010 – 2:41 pmAnyone who follows professional sports has experienced the frustration of having a favorite player go on the disabled list. Even more frustrating is when it’s for a strained or pulled muscle. In our minds athletes should be able to overcome “minor” injuries like these and when they are out for weeks at a time we begin to doubt their toughness or we inevitably label them as being injury prone.
OK, so maybe you haven’t done this, but I certainly have. A strained muscle simply was not a good enough reason for one of my favorite baseball players, Chipper Jones, to constantly be missing in action. I guess I always thought he could or should “play through it”. Well, the tides have turned. That’s right, I recently experienced my first ever sports injury that didn’t involve spraining an ankle. While playing in a basketball game in a local rec league, I managed to strain my groin. Or more specifically my hip flexor.
The thing is, I didn’t even realize that I had strained it. When the guy I was guarding made a strong move to the basket my hip seized up on me as I tried to react, but I didn’t experience any real pain and I was able to finish the game. The next morning I woke up to some discomfort and pain in the general groin region. Naturally, I had made plans to go skiing for the first time in like 10 years that weekend, and I just couldn’t cancel. Let’s just say that the day on the slopes certainly didn’t help!
After a couple of weeks of inactivity I was still experiencing pain and so I finally went to the doctor, where I was diagnosed with a level one hip flexor strain. LEVEL ONE! Jeez, I thought it was worth at least a level 2, but no, that would have required bruising which I didn’t have.
So, six weeks after my initially injury, and a few sessions of physical therapy later, I finally got on the court again yesterday and (very tentatively) played in my first basketball game. And no, I’m still not completely healed. I am hoping to be pain-free in another week or so, and then it’s finally back to regular workouts and full-speed basketball. (Of course I had just been whipping myself back into shape when I hurt myself, and yes, I know everyone says that.)
The moral here is that I will now never criticize an athlete for missing time due to injury. I gained some much-needed perspective over these past few weeks in attempting to heal from my lowly level one strain. I also learned that it can easily take a couple of months to heal even this relatively minor injury, especially without the expert care that athletes receive (and even for them it can be weeks before they are ready to go again).
Here’s to a hopefully injury-free rest of the year!
