I've always been quite active person and played football regularly until I was about 35 but it got to the stage when waking up the morning after football with sore Achilles Tendons meant I couldn't play golf and every niggling injury would take 2 weeks to heal rather than 2 days so I decided to hang up my boots and start cycling. When I got to back to Saudi their was an inter-company football tournament being organised so stupidly I volunteered!!!
We had a couple of training sessions which went well then on the 3rd one I strained my Quad muscle in my right leg, that should have set the warning bells ringing. 2 weeks later my niggling injury had healed however I'd missed the 1st game of the competition, which my team lost however I was in goal for the second game which went we won 2-0. We followed up that with a 1-0 victory in appaling weather conditions, I honestly have never seen rain come down as hard, this meant we were well placed to qualify for the knockout stages of the competition.
The remaining match which we had to win to qualify was played on Tuesday 2nd December, I think the score was either 0-0 or 1-1 with about 10 minutes to play when a lose ball was heading towards me in the box so I ran out to collect the ball. As I slid across the floor and put my hands of the ball the defender and attacker had a tangle of legs and subsequently one of their knees went into the back of my elbow completely dislocating the joint. As described by one of my teammates I sounded like a wounded camel lying on the floor and at 1st they thought I was play acting as the other team seemed to be auditioning for a parts in a remake of Platoon, going down like they'd been shot every anyone got close to them.
Anyway, I laid on the floor for what seemed like an eternity waiting for an ambulance to cart me off to hospital with my arm bent the wrong. 2 nights in hospital, lots of drugs and x-rays and my elbow was finally put back into the right place under general anesthetic. I remeber going for 1 x-ray and the nurse took an x-ray of 1 side of my arm and then told me to turn my arm over so they could get another angle, well I rotated my upper arm as instructed but my lower arm and hand didn't move!!!!! that wasn't very pleasant so as i turned my upper arm one of my colleagues had to rotate my hand at the same time.
The match was abandoned that night however my team won the replay 5-0. We got all the way to the final to be narrowly beaten 4-3 where I was presented with an award for the best injury of the competition.
Yes, that really is my arm!!!
8 weeks of my arm in a cast then led to some physio sessions 3 times a week to regain the movement however I couldn't straighten my arm without being in pain and a lump had developed on my forearm so off I went for another scan which resulted in surgery to remove said lump and shave the end of my bone off as that was causing the pain. a further 4 weeks bandaged up and more physio.
Thankfully I've regained all of the movement in my arm but there's still some work to do to rebuild the muscle but what I must say is that the treatment and speed of getting anything I needed done In Saudi was far better than anything the NHS could offer.
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