Being the Yankee can be hazardous (June '07)

Those of you who have known me for a while are probably quite familiar with my proclivity for major medical mishaps. My friend's wife once said that I am accident prone, but the truth is quite the opposite. If most people knew how many serious and/or fatal injuries I have avoided, I think they'd be quite impressed with how few serious injuries I have actually sustained.

A quick rundown:

I have broken my left wrist twice.

I have broken my right wrist once.

I have broken every single one of my fingers at least twice.

I have broken my nose eleven times.

I have snapped and dislocated my left ankle, leading to a surgery that has left me with a plate and five screws.

I have destroyed the ACL in my right knee, which required a pretty serious surgical replacement involving a grafted piece of my patellar tendon.

A few years later, I got to have another surgery on that same knee to have cartilage removed after it had torn off and formed a mechanical blockage.

Surprisingly, I've only needed stitches twice (apart from the surgeries,) and staples three or four times.

All of this was before I turned thirty years old. In fact, most of it happened during a ten year span between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.

Now, at this point you might be thinking that I've shot myself in the foot with my claim about not being accident-prone. Hear me out...

At age fourteen, I started playing football. From the ages of sixteen to eighteen, I wrestled almost daily. When I got to college, I played soccer for the college team. From the ages of 20-26, I spent every summer and many weekends working on a ranch. Those same years marked my baptism into the world of rodeo, where I participated in roughstock events every summer weekend and some fall weekends for that entire period. Working on that ranch required me to spend almost every day working on horseback or on the back of a tractor of some sort. I also spent those years paying for some college expenses by working construction jobs, except of course for the year that I was a guard in a correctional facility. When I graduated from college, I moved to GA, where I stared fighting in MMA bouts and worked for two years as a bouncer.

Take all of that into account, and my list of injuries is surprisingly minor.

I'm a bit pressed for time today, so I won't regale you with the stories of how each injury happened (don't worry, I planned to limit myself to the funnier ones.)

This was going to be another installment of "Getting to know the Yankee," but I think I've moved into a much more specific type of blog. I think I can classify this as an explanation blog instead.

Thanks for reading...

~The Yankee