August 18, 2024

I sit waiting in the lobby of a chilly doctor’s office. I am appreciative for the change in temperature. For the past nine days, I have been trudging with 70lbs of gear through the Catskills. Last night, my Platoon ran a mission that lasted seven hours and took us up and down three mountains. In the final part of our exercise, I’ve managed to get hurt. The last part of our exercise was to drop out gear, go down to the combatives pit, and fight. In a moment of bad luck, I had to fight a guy equally as strong as me, but faster and with less knowledge of how to fight. He slipped around to my back and yanked me from my knees backward to the ground. My feet were trapped under me, and my foot was stuck to the ground as my body rotated. “POP POP POP,” shots rang off in my leg. I felt it, but could not hear it over the cheers and jeers of over 100 of my peers, circled around watching the fight.

Immediately upon feeling the pops, I tapped. My peers, expecting a show out of the theatrical Luke Noonan, began to laugh. They couldn’t believe I’d been submitted less than ten seconds into the fight. Their laughs faded as they watched me roll over, grimacing in pain, and reach for my ankle. The first thing that ran through my head was a mental video of me throwing the shot put. “How on earth am I going to do that?” Another video plays of me running. “I’m not going to be able to do that either.”

“It’s probably a sprain,” I am told. The doctor is not in, and I’m seeing a Sergeant who has been turning away people like me all summer. I bet she thinks I am just trying to get out of training. The training is over; I just want help.

All I leave with is an ankle brace and some ibuprofen. For the next 36 hours, I hobble around wherever I am told to go. Finally, when the doctor comes in Monday morning, I am first in line to see her. She orders an x-ray for me, and I go to the hospital. I don’t mind being sent there, because they have their own dining hall. It’s the best food I’ve had in two weeks since arriving for training. The next day I go back to see my results. The doctor has me hobble over to sit down on her table. She’s suddenly much more interested in my injury than she was yesterday. She performs a variety of tests and exercises on me. She then tells me that the x-ray results have come back and I have a fractured fibula.

My mind races as she explains her medical jargon to me. “Fracture in your fibula blah blah blah” she drones on. I am already creating a mental plan of how I can fight past this. I know that I’m about to develop a strong upper body the next few weeks. It doesn’t hurt to do hip adduction and adduction, so I’ll do plenty of that. “The x-ray showed that your malleosis blah blah blah.” She doesn’t know who I am and only cared when she knew for sure I was actually hurt. She doesn’t know that I’m going to be an All-American next year. She doesn’t know that I hit shoulders yesterday at an outdoor weight room.

The doctor opens up her closet and reaches inside. Pulling out a boot and crutches, I feel conflicted. Sure, it’s not the ideal way to begin off-season training. But, at least it’ll prove to everyone I wasn’t just faking it this whole time.

I am going to call the hospital when they open Monday morning and have them send me a copy of my x-ray. It’s been three weeks since it was taken. I will hang it up on my wall and look at it daily. A reminder that even a broken leg can’t hold me back from achieving my goals. A reminder that when I beat you, you have no excuse.

Here’s a photo taken a couple minutes before I went down. Eventually I got that guy off my back, put him in the dirt, and choked him out. Your time will come soon, navy.