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Tuesday, January 06, 2004
 "I want to be like her. Do you want to be a part of my new journey to the self?" This is a photo of Pauline Hsieh, a climber from the States. I saw this picture in thenorthface.com and sent it to a friend and thought wow, I can't wait to climb. For the past few years, I've been hesitant to take up a sport because I had this injury that no one could explain. In high school, my right elbow kind of “locked”. Meaning I couldn't straighten it and I couldn't bend it too much. It was just locked in a position that left me frustrated and helpless. Back then, being injured was like the end of world (That's also what some friends said about my smoking. Hehe. :), but since the doctors couldn’t find anything, my friends and I just put it aside and lived as if I was perfectly fine. I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me. I had physical therapy for a while, although now I realize that the doctors gave me therapy for a condition they didn’t even understand. Hmmm. That was in 1995. I backed out of my first Palarong Pambansa because I couldn’t swim properly anymore. I stuck to cheerdancing and my elbow would lock every now and then, but I didn’t want to feel sad all the time, so we just had fun with it! I’d wear my sling to school sometimes and lend it to Carlo Solis at recess and lunch. He was a basketball player and I told him that it would get the girls’ attention. It was so much fun because girls kept on asking him what happened and he had a ball coming up with different minor injury stories. Then he’d return it to me in class with a big smile on his face. Haha! I also developed a Popeye arm! I’m right-handed, but since I had to do a lot of things with my left instead, it buffed up big time. Pam Floro had a Popeye arm, too, because she was a tennis player, so she used to call me her other half. Baduy, no? Put us together and we were a Popeye! I gave up on sports in college because I didn’t know what to do with the injury anymore. I remember wanting to join CADS back ’99, but the injury acted up again the day before the audition. Then I pushed it in Senior Year and danced 3 major dances for CADS, which wasn’t so bad. I wore my sling sometimes, but I hated explaining my condition to people because, well, I didn’t exactly know what I had. Things got worse when I started working. I’ve been with the company for almost 3 years and I’ve done some pretty extreme things, but the pain visited me in the field once in a while, making camerawork and just plain thinking and writing almost impossible. So again, I made fun of it by making slings out of whatever, be it a jacket or a shirt or a tie-dyed sarong, and getting tipsy with beer just seemed to be the best temporary cure. Last month, however, was a different story. I was working at home and unfortunately, just reaching for my camera on the floor was a big no-no. Before I even touched the camera, my elbow locked and I just thought ok, here we go again! But the pain lasted for so long and on the third day, my whole arm actually went numb and it grew swollen and tender, making it difficult to write or type. Good thing I went to see Dr. George Canlas a few months before. He’s a sports doctor that I met in the Philippine Ironman 2002, and thank God because for the first time after 8 years, someone knew what was wrong with me. Last May or June, I had an X-Ray in St. Luke’s Hospital and Doc found a bone fragment floating above my elbow. It was pretty big, almost an inch I think, and it was a chip from my humerus. He said that it was growing on its own and that it may have chipped off when I was still a gymnast. I recalled all my gymnastics injuries and aside from sprains and slamming my feet on the high bar, I remember falling on the floor once and landing with my arm straight (Yup, that’s a sin!!!). Since then, my elbow clicked every time I did pushups. So there! I had an injury which may have been over 10 years old! And none of the other doctors saw it. Grr. The chip would float around and lodge itself into my elbow, and last month’s swell was because the chip went deeper, possibly pressing on nerves and veins So Doc performed arthriscopic surgery, making little incisions only a centimeter long on both sides of my arm. The stitches are really cool because they’re under the skin, so the wounds look like tiny scratches. He also used a little camera for the surgery, so we taped the footage on VHS, para ala-Discovery Channel! And to my amusement, the surgery was specifically called debrivement because the chip was considered as debris. Yeah, garbage in my arm! That’s what it was! We kept the bone that he took out and it’s in pieces now (They look like korniks!) because he had to take it out piece by piece to fit through the incision (Reminds me of abortion. Did you ever see Silent Scream?). They’re pretty cool to look at because they’re so small. It’s amazing that that tiny bone was the cause of all that pain. It’s like those little shattered bones that they took out of Mama years ago when she had a slipped disc. My sisters and I looked into the little jar and screamed, “That’s it?!” Well, big bone, small bone, problems come in all shapes and sizes, and mine turned out to be a chip. I think I’ll always be accident prone, but at least that little chip, even if it kept me from doing so many things, taught me to be more careful with my joints and to take care of my body. It’s a new year and I feel so brand new now that my arm has been rid of “debris”, and I’m so excited to go climbing. And diving. Or I can just go to the gym. Yippe, how exciting! Tomorrow, I’m going to give Doc Canlas and Thank You card. He got rid of one limitation in my life. Now all I’ve gotta do is quit smoking! *** >My first Photo Friday! This week's Photo Friday assignment for the is The Best of 2003. I've never submitted a photo for the site, mostly because I never had time to gou out and take photos before the next assignment came out. But I didn't have any problems looking for this picture! [Click here.]
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