We, as humans, of course carry our stories of pain with the zany zeal more accustomed to children at a carnival; yet we will throw a pathetic attempt of hesitancy in telling the story.
So there was my attempt...
It all begins two and a half years ago, when in the throes of full summer, a young man attempted and succeeding-ly failed in reserving the sanctity and health of his body. In a hope to save a life, the life of a fluffy, soft euphoric creature, the life of a young canine, the life of a puppy, he instilled the strict constitutions of pain firmly in to his heart for all of his short eternity.
This young puppy had forgone all warnings and strong commands to revel away from the flowing, watery destiny that hid in shadows and swirling currents. In mistaking gravity for firmness of foot, or rather of paw, the young puppy fell to the water, faster than Hades to the underworld, faster than headless Medusa...
The crashing water grew in noise tenfold, time faltered towards an inconsistent standstill, and the young man had no choice in his choice of action, for how could anyone let a puppy be swept away in a guilty torrent of apathy?
Leaping from his rock perch, he sailed in a plummet of adrenaline towards the young puppy thrashing miserably and desperately, inevitability rushing soon to wrap him in it's watery cocoon. It was in a sudden, startlingly flash of reality that the young man was made aware of his path of descent, a descent of doom in many ways. Boulders flickered haphazardly beneath the rifling, sun-specacled water. Boulders that were very real, very sharp, and just beneath the surface.
In that brief moment of staggering realization that all witness when en-route towards the despairing path of pain, the young man twisted his body as if hoping to change the unchangeable.
A splash to rival any krackenous monster, the young man came down with an arm around the puppy, while his right knee came down around the edge of one those boulders. Pain flashed, pain seared, pain as real as dragons, roared and racked through his body...
His knee had absorbed the very essence of brute force, his patella shattering apart, much akin to the shatter of ice on a frost-swept day. His vision swam as though trying to carry him from the watery clutches itself; the puppy howled in the indignation that only a young puppy about to drown could hope to.
The current pulled the young man farther away from the shore, but somehow, through the pain his survival took precedent and one arm stroking, the furious persistence of that sun-specaled water clinging to him as if he were Odysseus and it Calypso..
Crawling to land, and helped by the woman who's puppy had decided upon the day's aquatic adventures, he lay shuddering and gasping.
Thirty minutes later, his knee was being stitched up and he was sent on his way with cautions of a deep bone bruise and some bleeding, with no pain relief to be found or prescribed...
He sat awake for over 24 hours, in a pain that description could only hope to emulate, with only the soft, pathetic brush of tylenol to help appease his constant silent screams..
It was not till 32 hours later, after twisting the knee in a fit of an unavoidable lapse of balance, and no significant pain relief, that it was conclusively determined the serious nature of this injury...
18 hours later... lying in wait for surgery
4 hours later... so hopped up on anesthesia that recurrent warnings to breathe were more often than not, and the new addition of three screws to hold together that damn important kneecap...
The rest of that summer.... a loss of two jobs, the inability to walk, move his right leg, sleep on his stomach, popping pain pills like tic-tacs, and a complete unraveling of the social life of one who has yet to experience his first summer being 21. It was more than physical pain, it was a pain that was resplendently preserved through pain and the self-pity that accompanied with it.
A new respect was developed for the guys in movies, you know the ones, the guys who mobsters threaten to break their kneecaps...well all this young man can advise is keep those knees healthy!
The Letter H---The creation of hammer knee
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