Searing pain shot through my spine. It went from the top of my back to the tips of my toes. It was the most agonizing pain I have ever felt in my life; it happened while I was doing a deadlift. I pretended the pain was not there and kept pushing through the exercise; I am an athlete and that is what athletes do. If I had known that pushing through the pain was going to make my pain worse, I would have stopped. I had been playing soccer for nearly fourteen years and one rule that I set for myself is to play through the pain. I have always been a very accident prone person, so I was used to being told I was not allowed to play because I could make my injury worse. After being told that time after time, I started to hide the fact that I was hurt …show more content…
Every step felt like I was being branded with a hot iron I continued to lift and practice with my travel team that week without telling anybody about my pain. I secretly took ibuprofen and kept going. I had the state tournament that weekend, so I told my dad that my back had been hurting a little bit but not to worry about it because my dream school, University of North Carolina in Charlotte, was coming to watch me along with numerous other schools I was interested in. I took ibuprofen and went to the first game. Within the first twenty minutes, a girl ran into me when I was in mid - air which knocked the breath out of me, and when I landed, I felt my pain explode in my back as if an atomic bomb had gone off. I did not know what to do other than sit on the ground in utter agony. Even though I tried to cry, no sound came out of my mouth. It took the referee about five minutes to realize I had not gotten up. I was carried over to the bench where a trainer came and looked at me. All she was able to tell me was that it was internal, and she could not do anything other than give me ice. I was terrified because nobody knew what to do with me because they didn't know what was wrong. We had a game later that afternoon, so my dad my friend Kalel, and I went to the ER because I was in need of something fast, and all of the doctor's offices were closed because it was a Saturday. When we got in the office, we had an x- ray and found …show more content…
In December, I started to see my last doctor and he told me what was wrong. We went to see him one time and he said he could give us a result within the next five days. My sixteenth birthday was the day after my appointment and, I was having the best day when my dad and I got the call. We were one our way to Shelbyville to take my driving test when his phone rang. Being the nosey person that I am, I was trying to figure out who was calling him and what they were talking about. My dad said a bunch of "okays" and "reallys" and ended the call with a "thank you." When he got off the phone, he had a depressed look on his face, so I asked what was wrong. He told me the doctor said I had broken two parts of the same vertebrae but, they were from two different time periods. One looked like it had happened about six months earlier, which explained my pain from May, and the other looked a lot more recent, which explained my pain from November. They told us they would be sending a back brace that I would have to wear for at least three months. This was starting to turn into the worst sweet sixteen that I could think of. The brace was like a corset. It did not allow me to breath and when I wore it consistently, I lost a few pounds because it was so tight that I was not able to get full because there was no wiggle room. When I was done wearing the brace, I had lost eleven