Health is precious, we should not take it for granted

A month ago, I would have read the coverage of Tomás Waters’ terrible knee injury and subsequent ill-health with a 21st century level of interest.

By that I mean I would have left sufficient gaps between the sips of latte to feel bad for his misfortune before quickly moving onto a video of a bulldog sliding down a flight of stairs while asleep or scrolling through the timeline of the latest Twitter spat between a pair of social media heavyweights I wouldn’t recognise in the street.

But thankfully, I got a good kick in the ass at the end of October that has given me at least 3% of an understanding of what the Wexford hurler has been through.

It’s terrible to take health for granted and I hold my hand up. But it’s a mad and sad feeling to realise the body can sometimes be knocked around when you least expect it.

Waters’ knee injury was bad enough but the sorry tale of how his body has angrily rejected the screws placed in his knee to keep it together is the epitome of frustration and misfortune.

Please don’t think I am putting myself in a class of anything even close to that of an inter-county hurler of Waters’ ability.

He suffered his injury simply because he operates at a level of physicality which 99% of us only come close to when we venture too close to passing traffic.

But many of us share some small sense of how his life got held up by an escalation of terrible luck.

For me it was mostly about stupidity. The other player’s studs went in a little high during a Wednesday night game but I thought nothing more of it. The shin guards were slipped back in the following Saturday evening for a Shamrocks reserves game and as luck would have it, the first team was short so I did a 70-minute stint at right back for them as well.

The Over 30s were also a little stuck the following morning and since I’d made my promise to them, I stumbled back out onto the field at half-time on Sunday, not long after one of my team-mates pointed to the curious cut on my shin.

Just over 48 hours later, I was admitted to the emergency department of Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan.

All because I didn’t clean a stupid cut. It was that quick.

Things began to deteriorate on the Sunday night. Shivering and feverish on the couch, I struggled away from the NFL coverage to be late for dinner with friends. Monday, I was limping more noticeably and shivering more intensely. It would pass, I was sure of that. I just got a bad knock and the sudden winter chill had struck me down.

I woke early Tuesday in agony. Barely able to walk, the wound larger and blacker and the shin swollen, I was now at a crossroads.

Ride it out for another day like a ‘man’ or take that first unsure (and painful) step into the dreaded American healthcare system.

“Whoah,” was the worryingly spontaneous gut-reaction of my new doctor, the expression tripping carelessly from her mouth just before “hello”, comically lacking in subtlety but appreciated by me all the same.

She went off to get a second opinion from a colleague whose medical opinion was of an eerily similar vein. “Whoah, oh god.”

I was sent straight across the East River to embark on the hospital’s form-filling, blood-giving, allergy-denying, alcoholic-consumption-estimating merry-go-round.

Just like Waters, they feared infection of the bone.

Just like Waters, they leathered me with antibiotics by IV. And just like Waters, I went to sleep that first night wondering what the hell happened.

As Wednesday slowly took its course and I became more adjusted to my surroundings, things became a little clearer.

It wasn’t MRSA or any of that other serious stuff but I needed plenty of treatment and I’d dodged a serious bullet.

As I write this four weeks later, the pace of healing is steady but slow and I won’t be kicking a ball any time in the near future.

Tomorrow, celebrating Thanksgiving in Sparta, New Jersey, we’ll do that thing where we announce what we’re thankful for and I’ll be thankful for my health.

I can’t emphasise enough that my short three-day stay in the US healthcare system compares not even slightly to the incredibly drawn out affliction which has befallen Waters.

But hopefully, someone on a pitch somewhere will clean that tiny cut. And hopefully, on Sunday week, December 8, the people of Wexford will rally around their young county player and support the Tomás Waters fundraiser and get him back on an even keel.

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Twitter: JohnWRiordan