MY LIFE, PART 24: How to set a bone straight

Spending two hours in an ER waiting room was no walk in the park. I saw all the pain, all the chaos around. It stuck in my memory forever. All the blood, fractured bones, screaming, crying, tears. It was an infernal day in Plzeň.

Finally it was my turn. They took me to the plaster room, lifted me from the stretcher and onto a regular hospital bed, and three doctors stooped over me. Two of them were pressing me to the bed, and the third one said: “It’s going to hurt a bit now.”

He took out a huge syringe, it was really big, and stuck it in my ankle.

I screamed at the top of my lungs, it must have been heard a hundred kilometres away. “Ooooowwwwwwwwww!”

In a moment my ankle had swollen to the size of half a football, and I couldn’t feel it anymore. As if it ceased to exist.

It helped, my leg didn’t hurt anymore, but the two doctors wouldn’t let go of me, they kept pressing me into the mattress. I thought it was weird. It wasn’t as if I could run away! I couldn’t even get up.

What I didn’t notice was that the third doctor was setting my bones straight. He was waggling my foot and making faces, as if he was biting into a lemon. It was probably hard to put my bones in the correct position, so he had to make an effort. And all I could do was hope.

Finally they prepared the plaster and encased my filthy foot with it. If I’d come home this dirty, my mom would tell me off. No way I could go to bed with dirty feet like that. But this was an exception.

“Once the swelling goes down, we’ll refit the plaster cast,” they told me when they were finished.

Had the operation gone wrong, it could have been the end of big football for me. I would be playing second league, maybe even just non-league football. I would have a limp and people would pity me from the stands: “Poor guy, he has a crooked foot and he’s still trying to play.” I didn’t know any of that then. For over a week, I was just staring into a wall and all I wanted was to get back on the pitch as quickly as possible.

Back to my friends. Back into the goal.

See? Even then I was thinking about where my place on the pitch would be.

P.S. Next week - Chapter 25