You Pulled What Out of Your Athlete's Where Now?

I've been around the athletic training room for ten years now, first as an athlete and student and then as a certified, and I can say with some certainty that I have seen some pretty weird things.  Some of the strangest stuff has been things I've had to extract from athletes.  You'd think by the time they're teenagers they would stop putting erasers up their noses but no, that's not the case.

2003 - "Oh whoops, they're stuck..."

Most kids don't like the nose plugs.  Honestly, who likes shoving a scratchy cotton tampon up their nose?  Not me.  The day after a game where I had plugged a player's nose, he came to the training room to get taped and began to play with the box of nose plugs we had on the table.  Suddenly the bright idea came from his teammates - how many can you fit in your nose?  I turned my back to tape an ankle and then heard the fatal words "Oh whoops, they're stuck..." Four nose plugs up one pretty normal sized nostril.  FOUR.  Fifteen minutes and a hefty scoop of skin lube later my player had the use of his nostril back. 

2004 - "Can you look at my eye?"

When a player says they've been having itching in their eye all day usually my first guess is pink eye, allergies, or a corneal abrasion.  Not even close with this lacrosse player.  Peeling back his eyelid with a cotton swab I noticed the problem immediately but was still pretty foggy on the cause - how on earth did he get a half centimeter long piece of mechanical pencil lead in his eye?  How I didn't immediately come to the answer I got I'll never know - "Oh, we had a lead fight yesterday afternoon."  Clearly I should have thought of that one right from the start.

2005 - "...well they gave me five bucks!"

We adults know it's a bad idea to put things in our noses, they're fragile.  For some of my football players, this lesson hadn't yet been learned by the age of 18.  This particular individual came in to the athletic training room with tears in one eye and blue mucous emerging from his nose.  I pointed at the tissue box and asked no questions.  There's a point where you just don't want to know - but I got to know anyhow of course.  My football player snorted an entire pixie stick.  If you're not familiar with this particular confection, I can tell you that they're on the sour side and completely sugar.  If you've ever been making a ten gallon cooler of Gatorade and gotten the powder dust up your nose then you know how uncomfortable this is.  After flushing him through with saline, I finally had to ask why he did it.  Personally I'm not sure it was worth the five bucks!

2008 - "My foot is killing me, I think I have a blister"

Soccer players are prone to blisters, it's a fact of life, so when one comes in complaining that they think they have a blister that's usually what it is.  Normally I don't lance blisters unless an athlete is in a lot of pain or they're looking like they're going to get infected.  This one looked bad, like a blister had somehow developed under several layers of skin.  So we got out the callus shaver, shaved him down, then went to work with a scalpel.  Without going into detail, it was pretty obvious after the first cut that this was no blister.  A splinter then?  Sort of.  It was buried so deeply that it took three athletic trainers and close to 40 minutes to extract the half centimeter long shard of wood.  After puzzling over it for a minute, the athlete was able to identify it and how it got in there - over a month ago he had popped a blister using a toothpick, part of it must have broken off in his foot.

2009 - "My ear hurts, help!"

Swimmers are usually pretty good about not getting into too much weird trouble (aside from ridiculous injuries stemming from their inability to ambulate properly on dry land) but this one made the wall of fame, mostly because of how ridiculous it was.  A swimmer with ear pain probably has swimmer's ear, so you get your otoscope and take a look, find the swelling, send them to the doctor.  Or it could be a tiny wad of paper shoved way back in their ear.  How did it get in there?  "Oh... it might be a spitball."


2011 - "I just wanted to see what it felt like..."

In my old training room, I had my taping tables pretty far away from my office, so I didn't pay much attention to what was going on in there while I was taping.  A lacrosse player limped out while I was taping one of his teammates, and I noticed a small amount of blood running down his leg.  Naturally (in my best parent voice) I had to ask, what did you do?  Pulling up his shorts, he revealed three staples embedded in his mid thigh.  I held out a pair of forceps silently, and our conversation was about as follows:

Athlete: Can you do it?  It really hurts!
Me: Duh, but you put them in there.
Athlete:  I can't just seriously pull them out, ok?

At this point I rather unceremoniously yank all three staples out and proceed to scrub the area with an alcohol pad, much to the young man's displeasure.

Me: That's what you get for being a dumb ass.
Athlete: It hurts bro!
Me: What did we learn?
Athlete: [short pause] Don't be a dumb ass?
Me: Good boy.

I can't be the only one that this happens to.  Got a story about weird things you've removed from your athletes?  Share it!!!

All Sportsed Out?

Having just spent the last hour and a half in my office eagerly waiting in front of my computer screen for Indians tickets to go on sale, my work schedule in front of me, games carefully picked out on days that I actually have free, I started to think on the number of times I've heard my fellow ATCs tell me they don't watch professional sports.  College athletic trainer friends of mine often say they'd rather watch college sports, where the athletes are (technically) still there to have a good time.  High school athletic trainer friends say that more sports on top of their current work duties would just be too much.

Personally I've never understood this.  I'm in this profession because I love sports.  I can't get enough!  I think the problem comes from us as athletic trainers training ourselves to be tense and on alert during sporting events.  Have you ever tried going to one of your school's games as a spectator?  It's nervewracking, and generally you end up on the field treating some injury or another anyhow.

Even watching games on tv with other ATCs, I've noticed a tendency towards settling into our most comfortable "ready to run" position completely unconsciously.  If an athlete goes down on the screen?  All bets are off.  We're all ready to jump up, and then of course all suddenly feel silly. 

Here's the thing guys - we do what we do because we love sports, otherwise we'd be physical therapists or EMTs.  I find that if I'm not wanting to feel like a silly person while watching them, the best thing to do is find other athletic trainers to watch with.  That when when your favorite team's quarterback is down on the field and they're showing the athletic trainers out there along with a mass amount of instant replay footage, you can assess the mechanism of injury and judge the performance of your occupational fellows alongside other people who get it. 

Sure, we can't relax when we watch sports, but we can still have a good time.