Three weeks ago, Luke and I went up to the UCSC Fall Festival. This is where all the PE clubs put out a table and recruit students. Since all the students we had graduated, we desperately needed new blood to keep the club going.
Well, the day went great. For two reasons.
- I fulfilled the greatest pleasure in life: Doing what other people say you can’t do. Everybody put on sunscreen, except me. Everybody was saying that I should put it on, or else I’d get fried. Well, I was confident in my Bronzed God status, that I waved it away. Sure enough, I didn’t get any sunburn! Ha!
- We got a lot of recruits. (Most all of which have stayed)
The only thing to counter the greatness of the day was that I pulled my thumb… in a way. I was doing semi-free kumite with another fellow. After I attacked, he blocked and threw me on the ground (not hard of course). I threw my hand out to the ground, which really tweaked my thumb and wrist.
I was worried about losing flexibility in the wrist by not moving it much, so every day, I stretched it back and forth once or twice. It really hurt, but I figure, better than it freezing up. Anyway, two weeks later, bending my wrist still hurt. (it didn’t help that I was hammering and drilling with that hand) Seeing that stretching it didn’t really help it, I stopped for one week. So, at the end of the next week, it felt slightly better, but no real improvement.
So today, I was putting up joices in a house with Jorge. My wrist still hurt to bend it. After we got the joices up, I had an idea. I thought, why not grab onto the joice, and hang there to let the weight of my body pull my wrist straight? So I climbed the ladder. Then, I wrapped the fingers of my hurt hand around the joice. I clamped my good hand over the fingers of my bad hand so my bad hand wouldn’t be putting any effort into gripping the joice, so it wouldn’t slip loose, yet stay relaxed. When my hands were secure, I slowly took myself off the ladder, so I’d be hanging by my hands.
In my bad hand, I felt several *pops* and could feel things inside my wrist shifting around. When I stopped feeling or hearing things coming from my wrist, I put my feet back on the ladder. I bent my “bad” wrist, and to my delight, the pain was gone! Well, mostly gone, but significantly better than it used to be. That was a lovely surprise.
You know, when I was little, my mother always said I would be a chiropractor (well, not really). I guess she was right.
