What did I learn from my injuries?
I do have very limited medical and science knowledge and those fields are not tackled in this article so don’t lose your time in reading this if you’re looking for scientific answers 😉. All I’m sharing is my personal experience and my reflexions and guidance as a professional coach. It may resonate with your personal journey and help you in some way. I hope, at least, you enjoy the reading.
I went through a total rupture of Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) and tear of meniscus in 2017 – a very common injury in sport like skiing, football or tennis. I was playing tennis myself when I got injured. Looking back, I’ve always wanted to understand why I got injured. Why on that specific day? Was it simply bad luck? Was it because of my lifestyle and because I worked too much? Was it because I just had my second child and the lack of sleep? Etc, etc.
Before that, back in 2006, I caught a very rare cornea disease called Salzmann nodular degeneration. Both of my corneas were getting slowly but surely completely blurry and at some point, I could not even recognize a familiar face sitting in front of me in the bus. Fortunately for me, given my age at the time (24), I had priority on the list of organ recipient and went through 2 transplantations in 2006 and 2011 for both eyes. In that situation, my inner questions were more around: Why me? Will I be able to see properly again after the transplantation? Until when the transplanted cornea will hold back – 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Until I die?
So, here I am, with 2 injuries on both side of the spectrum: one that we all have heard about through sport medias or at least from one friend or relative who got it and the other one, extremely rare, including the radical act of transplanting tissues from someone else who passed away and decided to make the most generous donation in order to save someone’s sight… my sight.
16 years after the first transplantation, 11 years after the second and 5 years after my ACL operation, what did I learn and, in general, what can we learn from physical traumas? From those unexpected injuries and diseases who may be happening for a reason.
Understanding the root causes (or not)
I recently watched a movie that made me reflect on what happened to me. A very beautiful movie called My King, a French movie from Maiwenn (one of the too few recognized and well-known female director in France) with 2 great actors: Emanuelle Bercot and Vincent Cassel.
The main topic of the story is a consuming passion between a man and a woman. The background story of the female character is ACL rehab. At the beginning of the movie, we see her having a talk with her doctor who tell her this: “It is a joint that can only bend backwards. It therefore signifies the ability to let go, to give in, or even to step back. [...] It is easy to deduce that when we have pain in a knee, it means that we have difficulty in bending, in accepting a particular experience”. I connected with the story because I went through the same rehab process, I connected with some of the words that the doctor said in the movie although I don’t know and I don’t remember exactly if at that particular time I had “difficulty to accept a particular experience”. But it made me think…think back on what really happened before, during and after.
When the ACL accident happened, I had a stressful job, working full-time and regularly extra hours, checking emails in the evening and during the week-end, commuting 1h30mn every day and very constantly multi-tasking. At home, my wife and I had 2 daughters of 1 and 3, this means truly amazing moments as a family but also truly difficult moments such as lack of sleep, lack of time for myself, together as a couple and the feeling of never resting. Holidays, as an example, were a great opportunity to disconnect from work but you simply never get back those missing hours of sleep anymore.
This was before the injury…
During the accident, there is absolutely no particular reason why I injured myself. I was playing since 45mn already, meaning that my body was “awake” and my knee twisted on a movement I did repeat millions of times since I started to play tennis at the age of 6, without never any damage, but this one time, I immediately knew this was bad.
I’ll come back later on the rehab process but the after was simply a continuation of what I did before the accident. And the next logical step happened: burn out symptoms approximately 2 years after my operation. I did continue on the same rhythm, I did not get injured physically again during that period simply mainly because I stopped playing tennis and every sport solicitating ACL (lateral moves) but this time, it became mental. I slowly but surely experienced insomnia, panic and anxiety attacks until I raised my hand and said “That’s enough, I cannot keep doing things the way I’m doing it right now, otherwise I’ll go on sick leave and I don’t really know when and how I’ll be able to recover”.
So yes, it is valuable to do the work of trying to understand the root causes. If your intuition is telling you that this may be linked to your lifestyle, maybe it’s time to change something. Looking at your life with a different perspective and make a resonant choice of changing something. I’ve learnt that method in coaching recently and I wished I had learnt it back in 2017, it would have prevented me from continuing my unconscious travel on the highway to burnout during 2 years.
The other situation I faced (cornea), I felt I did not really “deserve” this situation. I felt it was unfair. There was no particular reason why I inherited this disease. The “why me” symptom and playing the victim, finding easy excuses given the difficult situation I was in, that was my day-to-day life for many years. At least that’s how I see it, looking back.
When I combine those 2 experiences, the message I want to convey is: don’t necessarily try to find a cause to an injury you had in the past or that you’re having right now. It may be important to understand where you’re coming from but irrelevant or inappropriate in some cases. The most important is how do you change your narrative from being a victim to someone more vulnerable and authentic, from someone who went through a trauma to someone who becomes, not necessarily stronger, but a better person, a better version of yourself applying your own criterias and not someone else’s.
In my case, looking back, those moments helped me living my life more in the present and be more in control of my decisions and choices. Despite the challenges we all face, there is always something to appreciate about them and I did start to appreciate more the little pleasures, the good moments in life and how lucky I am after all. While writing this article, I read the magnificent book of Bronnie Ware - The top 5 regrets of dying: A life transformed by the Dearly Departing (by the way this is a very joyfull book despite its title), there is the quote illustrating very well my feeling: “People play the victim forever,” she continued. “But who are they kidding? They are only robbing themselves. Life doesn’t owe you anything. Neither does anyone else. Only you owe yourself. So the best way to make the most out of life is to appreciate the gift of it, and choose not to be a victim.”
Making that conscious choice of changing your narrative will lead to something positive, something that will help you, that will serve you and guide you for whatever you’re trying to achieve later in your life.
The Rehab
The injury “afterlife” or rehab is a long period (up to 2 years, sometimes even more) where you learn everything from scratch on how to feel, use, strengthen an entire part of your body. This time is usually tough for you and your close family or partner, here to support you psychologically and logistically. You are full of doubts, pain, highs and lows but you learn a lot about yourself, about your capacity to rebound, your capacity to accept what happened and what you’re going through and about your decision (or not) to make a resonant choice and change something in your life that will prevent another injury, and another, and another…
I am personally a big fan of sport. I do sport on a regular basis. As I said, I stopped playing tennis but I run, swim and cycle on a regular basis. Over the past recent years, especially since I got my knee injury, I became a fan of sport documentaries, especially the ones where the champion recovers from a massive injury and then go to surgery, rehab and return on the arena, sometimes even stronger than before the injury. The one made on Andy Murray, grand slam winner and ex n°1 in the world of tennis is a good example. Why? because it’s a very powerful story: someone at the top of his game, at the “top of the world” who has been working so hard that his body cannot follow anymore, hence a dramatic situation caused by the injury, a lot pain, doubts and introspection on the “why am I doing all this?”, gets the courage to face his challenges and make sometimes very difficult choices, persevere and repeat the same exercises ever and ever again until he finally gets there. Simply put, it is like the story of any life fully lived, with ups and downs, with vulnerability, exposure of weakness and choosing to be a victim or deciding to learn something positive about all this. Sometimes an injury can open your eyes on many things and reveals so much more than sweating and rebuilding muscles. On my side, I’ll probably never play tennis again but every single time I go out and practice a physical activity, I do have a smile on my face, I’m thankful and I feel alive.
And now what…?
Since those injuries happened to me, I do listen more to what my body tries to tell me and I do my best to do something about what I hear. When my body complains for example, I practice yoga and meditation, I do get extra hours of sleep or I do sport if the complaint comes from not moving enough (back and shoulder pain).
« We suffer more often in imagination than in reality », this inspiring quote from Seneca summarizes well my conclusion of this story. Of course, a physical injury will make you suffer, but only for some time. The rest of the pain and its level of intensity remains in your brain and what you do with it, the choices you make.
Proof reading my text also made me realize those experiences and guidance could be very well applied in other situations such as failures, challenging situations or life in general.
Interested about this article? Feel free to contact me here.
