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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  The unbearable lightness of a knee surgery
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The unbearable lightness of a knee surgery

Musings from a convalescent (amateur) tennis player on injuries and sports

Photo: iStockPremium
Photo: iStock

Some of you reading this may know that I’m on an enforced absence from an early love—tennis—and in fact from sports altogether. This is because I had surgery on my knee three weeks ago. The ligament was torn, I finally couldn’t ignore it any longer and, after several months of trying exercise and medicines, my doctor suggested the surgery.

“You’re still young," he said, by way of lifting my spirits, “and you’ll recover sooner now than if you do it later."

So I’m mostly at home these days, apart from physiotherapy sessions at a nearby hospital and occasional walks to a nearby library. I use a walker, though in the safe confines of my home I’m trying to wean myself off it.

In any case, the whole experience has given me a new appreciation for a few things I hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to before. In no particular order, here they are.

• The one dismal facet of this experience, first. Trying a few times so far to cross streets, I’ve had to wait for long gaps in the traffic. Because at least so far, not one car has either stopped or slowed down for me. I mean that: Not one.

One evening, I even made it halfway across a busy road, but had to stand there with my walker while traffic streamed past behind and in front. A young woman in the passenger seat even smiled benignly up at me as her husband swerved their Honda City around me. Eventually a constable ran over, held up his hand to stop the cars and helped me cross. My thanks, kind sir.

• Many more people than I might have expected have done bad things to their knees while playing sports or doing something else physical. Seeing me in my temporarily incapacitated state, they come up to commiserate and tell me their own stories. So much for the thought that my knee injury was relatively uncommon.

A friend’s daughter damaged both knees while still in her teens. She had the same surgery I did—if at a substantially younger age than I—and is more or less back to normal now.

Another friend was riding downhill on a cycle when two dogs suddenly ran right across his path. “I braked and flew right over the handlebars," he told me. “When I landed, my knee was like this"—and here he made a right angle with his two index fingers. Thirty years later, he wonders if he did the right thing by not going in for surgery to repair his ligament.

A third friend remembers the pain from tearing apart his knee during a football game. But he remembers even more clearly the pain afterward. After the surgery, that is.

• I now know what he means: The pain is something fierce. I’ve had his story, as well as other accounts of athletes recovering from sports injuries, on my mind since before my surgery. That is, I’ve been expecting and waiting for the pain. But for the first two weeks after the surgery, I wondered: where is it? Apart from a few times when I swung my leg off a bed and the knee had to take its full weight, I have been in no pain at all.

Then the bandages and cast came off. Then I signed up for physiotherapy. That first session, there were times when I thought might pass out from the pain.

The lady pushed me and my knee beyond anything I imagined possible so soon after it was repaired. Bending the knee in multiple ways, lifting and holding my leg straight out, exercising it against resistance to work the muscles... not since my original knee injuries has a body part hurt like this.

But of course, there’s a method to the pushing, a reward for the pain. Even with just eight sessions done, I can feel the knee getting stronger. Swinging the leg off the bed is no longer so painful. I’m walking almost normally. I quail before my physio sessions, but I get through them with gratitude for what they are doing for me. Playing tennis again may be some months away, but at least I can see it happening. A month ago, I could not.

• Sports at nearly any level needs some serious skills. A non-sequitur if there ever was one, I know. But at a time when I cannot play anything myself, I’ve been looking forlornly—when out on my walks—over walls or through fences at others who are playing. And for some reason, I watch them much more closely than in the past.

The guys who play volleyball at a small ground nearby, for instance. They are strict amateurs, several with bellies flopping over their waistbands, several with graying hair. But they play with a sort of whole-hearted enthusiasm I had never fully appreciated before.

The other evening, a paunchy man served, hard and fast. Then he raced across the back of the court to his preferred position, clearly left empty by his teammates for him to come fill. He arrived there just in time to parry back a shot from the other team that had just as clearly been directed at the empty spot. He almost had to dive to get his hands under the ball, but bounced back on his feet immediately and was ready to go again.

All right, I have never played volleyball regularly, but even so I knew I could never have matched this little manoeuvre he pulled off without a second thought. If he looked totally out of shape and not remotely athletic, his speed, strength and agility told quite another story.

It’s been much the same watching tennis at the courts where I usually play. Because I’m not facing them across the net, not running to retrieve their shots, I find myself able to admire the games of a few people I’ve played with in the past.

On Thursday evening, one moved to his left to turn a backhand into a forehand, then raced forward to pick up a short return. His quick, precise steps left me amazed. Another glided smoothly into a backhand volley, his shoulders turning in time, his racket out in front of him.

No, these are hardly Rafa Nadal or Andy Murray. No, these were not picture perfect shots that you might find in a tennis manual. But I can tell how, in simply playing regularly, these sometime partners have got some basics of the game right. Makes it an eye-opening delight to watch them play.

The joys of knee surgery, in that one volley.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Jukebox Mathemagic: Always One More Dance.

His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun

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Published: 04 Mar 2017, 11:46 PM IST
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