Hurt myself playing pickleball. Thankfully, it isn't as serious as I had worried it would be

There aren't a lot of sport options available here that were always available in my youth or even as an adult when I was living in the states. Well, that's not fair to say. Basically all sports are available here but due to the very hot and humid nature of this country I don't often participate in them because I am a hot-natured person anyway, so I sweat a lot. Introduce extremely hot and humidity into the situation and I am in danger of overheating like a care with an empty radiator is.

It is still the "cool" time of year here right now though and a lot of my friends have been talking about pickleball and I have heard about it for a long time but only first started playing it a few weeks ago. It is a lot of fun and less demanding than other sports as far as energy is concerned, and MUCH less demanding as far as the equipment that you need to have in order to play is concerned.

Yesterday was just the 2nd day that I have ever played it and we were into our 2nd hour of play when something pretty bad happened to me.

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I obviously can't show you the incident itself but we were into nearly the end of our 2nd hour of doubles play when I was running to save a point and do this stupid thing that we all do at some point or another and "rolled" my ankle in a way that you are not supposed to do and then collapsed to the ground. I immediately stopped playing because I could feel the pain in it already, but it wasn't like a broken bone sort of hurt.

However, I have a lot of experience with my left foot because it is the foot in which the only bones I have ever broken in my entire life are located. I initially broke them because I was driving a motorcycle like a jackass with flip-flops on and the bike landed on me after I failed to brake early enough at a roadblock in the middle of the road. I'll maybe talk about that incident at some point in the future but the moral of that story is "wear a helmet" because I would be dead now had I not been wearing one.

So anyway, I am super worried about this particular ankle because it has been through the ringer more so than the rest of my body.

Things had been going great for about 90 minutes as far as gameplay is concerned and the team I was on was winning more than we were losing no matter whose team I was on. This felt nice because other than one guy, all of us are beginners. I was starting to gain confidence at the net for volleying and perhaps this new gusto that I had for playing more aggressively is why I ended up getting hurt. I'm a competitive person by nature who is unwilling to admit that he is older now so well, I should have seen this coming.

_{that's not an ankle compress. It's an elbow one, but as it turns out they are essentially the same thing}

When I rolled my ankle and heard a series of cracks happen at the same time I was thinking to myself, oh no, please don't be re-broken. Having a broken bone is just awful. You are out of commission for months because of it and it sticks with you man! You don't forget how awful it is to be completely useless for so many weeks in a row.

Everyone was giving me the usual obvious advice about keeping it elevated, putting a compression sock on it, and getting ice on it as well. I did those things of course but it also occurred to me that while this feels nice and all, does it really help to prevent and injury? It seems to me that once the damage is done, it is done and that's that. Thankfully I have a nurse in the family so I contacted her about this and she told me that ice, compression, and elevation can help in speeding RECOVERY, it does absolutely nothing at the time of injury to make it somehow magically not be injured.

Since I was really tired from 2 hours of rather intense activity (by my standards) I was pretty tired anyway so I did what any American living in Vietnam would do: I ordered a bunch of tacos and quesadillas.

Then I had the attention of my two doggie-friends very closely for a while.

While I still will not put my face online, this is about as close as you are going to get to it. That's me, with my foot on ice and in compression, trying my best to keep it elevated on the sofa, while having a couple of tiny fluff-balls that are very interested in being best friends with me because there are tacos on the table right next to us.

I went to bed really early and set an alarm for 6am (today) and actually did get up then. Today is Thursday for me and if you read what I write at all you already know that it is DUMBO bowling day for me. My left ankle is tender but thankfully not broken and also not horribly sprained either. I have had 3 bones broken in this ankle about 10 years ago and sprained it very very badly about 5 years ago. While the broken bones took longer to heal the sprain was actually much more painful. Thankfully, neither of these things happens to be the case now. I do have to walk a but wonky though and I wish I didn't have to. Going bowling will be the real test.

The bad news is that for the first time in a while I have planned to go to visit a friend in a nearby country for the first time in a year, tomorrow. The tickets are already booked and paid for so obviously, this is not the best time to be gimped out. I'm hoping that by the end of today that I will have made a near full recovery, because I don't relish the idea of being in pain while trying to walk through 3 different airports tomorrow!

I'm gonna keep my fingers crossed on that one because the money is already spent and if there is one thing I really hate doing, it is wasting money.

If you are closing in on 50 years old like I am, then maybe don't try to be a hero in sports anymore. If you lose a few points I think that is better than hurting yourself.