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| a time before the injuries :) |
for those who dont know, when i was 14 i injured my fingers (7 of them). it began as one finger that hurt a bit. i didnt say anything and carried on climbing taking less weight on that finger so putting more pressure on the others. this carried on for about a month until they all hurt all of the time. now at this point the sensible thing to do would be tell someone your fingers hurt (ok so the sensible thing to do would be not let them get this bad in the first place but we'll ignore that for the time being). i having all the wisdom that the average 14 year old has decided to keep quiet and let my week holiday to germany (and so week rest from climbing) sort the small inconvenience of my fingers out. naively thinking that they would be better when i got back. but they werent.
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| just a bit of tape! what to do when all fingers are malfunctioning! |
now i know most people at this point will probably be thinking "this kid is a complete idiot is she trying to wreck her body for life?" and to some degree i would have to say i agree with you. but (and its a big but) theres a few things that made my thinking not all to unreasonable. to start i didnt actually know what finger injuries were or that it was even possible to injure your fingers. this seems odd considering the amount of time i spend in climbing centers but i can honestly say i never really thought about why people might be wearing tape on fingers or anything like that i dont think i had even really noticed that people did sometimes have tape on their fingers. (i am an incredibly unobservant person just to clarify that) so i didnt really realise that mine were injured. they were just hurting which of course is a completely different thing.
to me at that time there was another thing. i didnt want to admit any weakness to anyone. and having bad fingers in my eyes was a massive weakness. i was on a small climbing team and the other members of the team were at that point pretty much my only friends and there was no way i would let them know about my fingers as i thought they would just say i was making excuses for bad form and not believe me i also didnt want to let my coaches down or be told i had to not climb. to me at that time giving into anything was weakness and i was so desperate to prove to everyone (including myself) that i was not weak. i was scared i suppose of what they would say and that they wouldnt believe me so i just carried on climbing. it was the only thing i could think of to do and i just assumed they would stop hurting with time.
needless to say they didnt and i ended up taking time off climbing to rest them. this really should have been a lesson learned but it wasnt. one thing i have heard that might explain some of my behaviour is that at the age of 14 i didnt have the mental capacity to "see" the damage i was doing to my body for the simple reason of my brain not being fully developed to do so. i was still a kid really and the damage that i was doing so incomprehensible to me that i didnt comprehend it.
after this injury i was convinced i had learned my lesson. when fingers hurt you stop climbing! seems simple enough but 6 months later i had injured 3 fingers and i was still climbing despite the fact i knew i was hurt.
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| the day i hurt my fingers again |
looking back i know i was being incredibly stupid and even then i knew i really shouldnt be climbing but i had convinced myself that this time it wasnt all bad and that they werent as hurt as the other ones had been. of course i was wrong and i was being stupid but i was scared to admit i was injured again. since my last injuries i wasnt climbing as well as i had been. i have always been a cautious climber but i was trying to be careful not to hurt my fingers any more and somewhat reluctant to push myself too far out of my comfort zone. i know people thought i wasnt trying hard enough but i was so scared of getting hurt again. when i did injure the 3 fingers i didnt want to say anything as i thought people would think i was making up excuses for not climbing well. i also didnt want to take any more time off climbing. last time i had found it quite hard and i wasnt desperate to to repeat it again. so i just carried on climbing even though i knew deep down i shouldnt.
in the end i saw a physio and took 2 months off. i didnt want to but knew that they would just get worse unless i did. my friends were all really supportive and no one made any comments about me just making excuses or anything along those lines. i think because i had seen a physio and got professional advice people took me more seriously than they might have done otherwise. this time though i was determined to learn my lesson when i came to fingers i was going to recover get strong again and find a way to avoid doing this to myself again. my mother on the other hand had different ideas.
on the way home from the physio after i had told her about my fingers and got upset at having to take another summer off she suggested something that to me was quite out of the blue and the worst idea anyone could possibly come up with. maybe since i seem to keep hurting myself climbing i should stop. not just for a few months so that i could recover but stop completely until i had finished growing or preferably in her eyes untill i was 18 had left home and was no longer her responsibility.(as it turns out by this point i had actually stopped growing after reaching the towering height of 154cm!) needless to say this idea didnt go down all that well. i told her under no circumstances would i stop climbing. she said i could do long term damage to my body but i simply replied i would be careful. (ok so i hadnt been all that careful up to this point but ill ignore that) to me quitting climbing wasnt just a bad idea it was pretty much the most stupid idea i think i had ever heard. i was going to get better and i was going to climb again and i was going to avoid getting injured again. end of story thank you very kindly.
unfortunately it didnt really work out like that. i was careful and for the record i havent actually had anything more than a strained pulley since then and that was a few years ago now. i changed the way i climbed and avoided more finger injuries but i wouldnt be sitting here writing a blog on my climbing or lack of climbing if i wasnt currently injured. between those few fingers and my current injury i have had tendonitis in my right elbow (i think it was a pre cursor to my current problem) and i dealt with that quickly and efficiently. but last february when i was in sheffiled with my coach and my right arm hurt while i was warming up my reaction was far from what should have been expected from someone who knew the dangers of injury.
to start with i didnt stop climbing. i topped the climb and on the way down i massaged my arm trying to get rid of the pain. my coach noticed and asked me what was up. i told her my arm hurt but i thought it would be ok. so i got back on the climb. by the time i reached the 3rd clip i knew my arm most definitely was not ok. i told my coach and dropped off the wall. what came next was neither very dignified nor surpirsing, it was as i call it the emotional response to injury.
it was obvous that i was hurt i knew this it was blindingly obvious my arm had an intense pain right in the center of my elbow i couldnt straighten it at all without the pain increasing and i was cradling it to my body in much the same way as an animal would do when they are hurt. i can remember telling myself that it would be ok and that i wasnt really all that hurt and if i gave it a few minutes it would get better knowing full well it wouldnt. i had some competitions i wanted to do coming up and well i just didnt want to give up climbing if i didnt have to. i talked things through with my coach and she really suggested that i took time off and went to see someone. i argued back that it would get better soon and i would be ok. i said that maybe i should do the comps and then take the time off (ignoring the fact that things could get much worse in that space of time) i was trying to find any way possible to avoid taking the time off even though i knew it was really the only thing i should do.
i think, well i know, that i was scared of being injured again. i was scared of what my friends would think, what my parents would say and how i would cope with having to take more time off. i was scared of losing climbing and the people in it because with out it i didnt know the world i lived in. i was more scared about being injured than i really cared to admit. it wasnt just that my arm was hurting it was the whole concept of injuries. i had dealt with them before but found it hard and this time i wasnt sure if i would cope as well as i had done before.i also didnt want to admit defeat. as silly as it sounds i felt like i was giving in to my body if i agreed to rest it. it lowered my self worth as i wasnt as good as my friends who could train and didnt get injured and i didnt want to be the girl who was always injured as some people were starting to see me so i fought back against it with all my heart.
in the end my coach encouraged me to take the time off and in the end i agreed. after a rather tear filled conversation about looking after your body and doing the right thing i was finally persuaded to see a physio and rest untill such a time the physio thought it was fit to use again. i was told that it shouldnt be too long (as it was rather impossible to foresee the extent of the damage i had done to both my arms at this stage) and i would probably come back stronger as a result of the rest. (if it had only been a month or two i would agree with this however given my current situation im not sure i am going to be stronger on return :P) i resigned myself to the injury and pulled myself back together trying to ignore the niggling feeling in my head that was telling me on no uncertain terms that this injury would be worse than all the others (but im not going to go into that now). i do look back on it and ask myself why it took so much to persuade myself i was injured and why i never would stop.
i supose i do know the asnwers. i was scared of injury, i was scared of what people would say and i thouhgt that it made me weak to be injured so much. i know alot of people struggle to take the tme off they need for injurys. to give up somthing you love (and im many cases have given over your life to) isnt an easy thing. and i would say it can be especially hard for kids who really dont know any better to know when to tell someone they are injured. you get some who will try to find any excuse possible to get out of training as they would rather just climb so will tell you that this or that is hurting and i think it is very easy for those responsible for coaching children to assume that will be the case when someone comes to you claiming to be hurt especially as unless you are experienced in them things such as finger injuries are hard to spot. then you will get the kids who like me will do anything to disguse the fact they are injured and will damage themselves more as a result partly due to the fact they dont think they will be believed. so if any parent of young climbers or coaches of young climbers read this then i hope you will take what your kids say seriously and get it checked out as surely it is better to do that than have them try to push through it and end up like me?
i hope people can learn from my mistakes its about all i can really hope for in regard to those injuries i have had. and i hope that maybe by reading this it might at least persuade one person to ask about that niggle they have been ignoring for a while. if any one wants to know more about my injuries then my first blog - a catalog of injuries http://ailsagraham.blogspot.co.uk/2012_11_01_archive.html ) tells my story with hopefully a few bits that might make you laugh at my stupidity added in to try not to let it become too depressing. but i think for me stopping climbing wasnt a simple thing to do making the right decision on these things often hurts more than the injuries themselves.
