Chapter 33 Griffin
Griffin
The moment Griffin hits the ground after the tackle, he knows what’s happened.
The searing sensation in his knee, the one he spent a year rehabbing, feels like it explodes under his skin.
Professional athletes know these stories, familiar as campfire ghost tales traded among them, but no one wants to be the subject of one.
Griffin lays on the ground, the pain in his knee pulsing. Nausea wells in him, which signals something far more serious happening in his body than getting the wind knocked out of him. The whistle sounds, and Elliott’s voice is at his side.
“You okay, man? Here comes sports med.”
“Hey, Griff, what’s giving you problems?” Brandon, the responding trainer, has been on staff for several years and knows Griffin well.
Between the bars across his helmet, Griffin meets Brandon’s eyes. Brandon is worried, despite his efforts to mask it.
“I’ll give you three guesses, but I bet you only need one,” Griffin says.
Brandon frowns. “The knee?”
Griffin gives a single, silent nod.
“Can you sit up?” Brandon asks.
“Yeah.” Griffin accepts the help to sit up, then plucks off his helmet. He wishes he could delete all of the cameras, the crowd even, and suffer in private.
“All right, man, we’re going to pull you up and get you to the truck.” Brandon and a couple of his colleagues are at Griffin’s side, and despite their numbers, they groan under the effort of lifting him.
Once Griffin is up on his good foot, he presses on the two guys at his sides and hobbles for the truck. The crowd applauds for him, and he pulls a tight smile, seeing the sideline camera zoom in. He mouths the words, “Thank you.”
The fans have always been good to him.
The trainers help load Griffin in the bed of the truck, and the vehicle starts its exit to great applause. Once the truck pulls all the way out of the stadium and out of camera sight, Griffin lets his shoulders drop and his head sag.
He could choose to be optimistic right now.
All his teammates would tell him not to count himself out until he sees the doc.
“No sense digging your own grave if you’ve still got time on the clock,” Elliott told him last year when he got a concussion that took him out for a game.
And Griffin subscribes to the same approach himself most of the time, but nothing about this injury is business as usual.
Griffin knows this injury because it feels exactly the way it did last time, five years ago. Only this time he’s already had the talks with the doctors, and they warned him that he needed to protect this knee. That it was hurt so badly last time that another bad hit could be even worse news.
Griffin should probably make his peace with the fact that his season is over.
If not more.
The truck stops in front of the medical suite, and a staff member waits at the door with a wheelchair. He pushes it to the back of the truck, releases the tailgate, and once Griffin has slid himself to sitting on the edge, the staff member helps him into the wheelchair.
The medical suite is brightly lit, and the team doctor stands waiting in the room. He is friendly and far too jovial for the occasion, but that’s always been his way. The doctor starts with an ultrasound of the area, and he squints with focus at the screen as he moves the wand around.
Griffin’s knee has already swollen to double its normal size, and the doctor only confirms the fact when he says, “The swelling makes it hard to see the actual extent of the injury, so we’ll have to wait for a full prognosis.”
“Surely I’m out for the season.”
The doctor pulls back the ultrasound wand and looks at Griffin through wire-rimmed glasses. He doesn’t wear a white coat and instead is outfitted in the same gear as the athletic trainers.
“It’s likely.” He throws his hands up. “I don’t want to say too much while it’s swollen like this, but we’re both aware of your history.”
Griffin nods solemnly. “I’ve been having to ice it more often than usual, and we did a few shots earlier this season for inflammation.”
“That’s right, I remember. But we addressed the small-grade irritation. A hit like this will of course have the potential for worse impact on a healed injury like yours. But no amount of ice or shots could have prevented it. This was simply a bad hit in a bad spot. Wrong place, wrong time.”
Griffin lets out a pressured breath. The doctor is right: None of this was in his control.
But it doesn’t help at all to make Griffin feel less unmoored.
He does the right things, sticks to the schedule, skips the parties, does the recommended recovery exercises, and still he’s hurt.
It’s as if all he’s put in amounts to nothing.
A darkness wells inside Griffin, a hopelessness that feels a lot like football writhing in his grip, attempting to escape him.
“You know what to do: Ice, keep off it, and I’ll see you again in the morning. The crew will make sure you’re set up at home. You’re welcome to hang here for now.”
The doctor gives him a fatherly pat on the shoulder on his way out of the exam room, and Griffin mutters his thanks. As quickly as the doctor is gone, a knock comes at the door and Elliott appears.
“Hey, what’d they say? You okay?” Elliott eyes the knee. “Dang, you’re swollen.”
Griffin forces himself to make eye contact with his friend, and he tries for a smile.
Elliott narrows his eyes warmly. “You know you don’t have to play it like that with me.”
Griffin sighs, letting the facade drop. “I think it’s bad. Doc can’t say much for sure right now with the swelling, but I’ll tell you, it felt like an explosion. Exactly like it felt the first time.”
Elliott drops back on the wall. “I know it was a hard recovery last time, but if anyone’s up for the rehab, it’s you.”
“Thanks, man.”
It’s too soon for him to spill it to his friend, but Griffin’s worries don’t lie in his ability to buckle down and do the painful recovery work.
It’s the possibility that the recovery work will be only for the purpose of walking again.
The possibility that his knee is too busted up to get back to playing shape.
He’s not a rookie anymore. He’s thirty-two years old.
“Well, I gotta run before Coach finds out I left the locker room during halftime.” Elliott throws a wave over his shoulder and takes off.
“Thanks for risking your rear to come check on me.”
Griffin is lucky to have a friend like Elliott—all of his teammates really.
He sits quietly, waiting for staff to come and get him, to eventually help him home.
Naturally there’s a protocol for this. But in the quiet, alone with his mind, Griffin can’t help but wonder how much longer he’ll have those teammates.
How much longer his body can hold on to the football life.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this quickly.
He doesn’t have a post-football plan yet, and his mind goes to Aria. If she were here, she would know what to say. Probably she’d assure him that it would all turn out in the end. If only. Because Griffin can’t help but think otherwise.