Difficult Laughter

It was spring of my eighth grade year and I was ecstatic to start baseball up for my last year of middle school. I put in an absurd amount of work from waking up at 7 A. M. to go to baseball clinics to playing games all summer. Most important of all, though I was healthy, after a cartilage issue in my foot stunted my season the year before. Growing up, my dad had always pushed me to be better and get better at something, anything, every single time I practice or work on something. On the other end, my mom was always the support to keep me going every time I struggled with something or wanted to quit, she always made me keep going telling me to, “be patient you will be fine” then I would end up calming down after being frustrated. About three weeks in I started to feel a sharp pain in my elbow, and after an X-Ray that had not shown us anything new about my arm, which was typically a good thing. The doctor concluded that it must be a muscle or ligament thing, which is arguably worse for a pitcher. After another test this one being an MRI that revealed that I had been diagnosed with an injury that was grade 1(had it been grade 2 I would have had to have major surgery on my elbow). I had then been referred to two physical therapy offices, but decided to go with the one that had more baseball background. After talking to my physical therapist he told me that I had to do Tommy John rehab, but I would not need the surgery(which I did not know yet). What I did not know at the time was that Tommy John rehab was a long three and a half months process, but my family was there for me the whole time. About a month of going in to the PT office, I was not feeling any better because I was not able to play baseball. Typically this was best part of my year, so I started feeling down when I could not play When I got home my mom told me that I needed to look at this as a small process and take it one day or one week at a time. My dad told me that it would be a chance to better myself and reset my mind. I stuck to my exercises and was getting anxious to start the throwing program. Though we had solved my elbow issue, I started to have another pain. My immediate thought was to give up. I was thankful for my family that day because they kept me up in the times that I was feeling down. Physical therapy did not stop there because I had to basically restart. So, I did, and I began a throwing program about a week and a half later. It consisted of starting in the physical therapist’s office doing plyometrics and then go outside in a parking lot and throw to my dad for a certain amount of throws. It started at 30 throws and it would slowly increase by 10 every two sessions until I would eventually build up to one hundred-ten throws, the time that I spent in this process resulted in laughs because we would talk about different things and just laugh about them. I then had to start pitching which was a whole different beast in itself because there is typically more force in that which is all put on the elbow. Thus I ended up finishing the throwing program two months after that had happened which included the pitching portion. Once my physical therapist had seen me start and finish he asked me if I wanted to tryout for a summer team that he was running. That was the moment that I realized that I was done, I had completed all of my physical therapy and I felt great.

This experience taught me that hard work pays off to get to where you want to, and how to persevere through tough times. What I am now realizing is also what kind of family I have and that they are extremely supportive. I was able to laugh through this because it was such a long period of time that if I had not laughed through it, I truly do not believe that I would have finished and been able to recover with the want to play again. Laughter is a key component in getting through some things, and may be more important than people realize.

Photo by PMillera4 on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND