Matt Tuthill

Published in the Bennington Banner on December 15, 2007, the conclusion to Matt Tuthill’s first-person footbal series, “I, of the Storm”

ON THE MEND, AND LEARNING TO NEVER SAY NEVER

The nurse seemed confused, so she asked me again.

“Are you sure you don’t have to go to the bathroom?”

“No,” I said, my head falling left and right in a drug-induced haze.

“Really? Because it’s been about six hours.”

I was defiant.

“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

At that very moment, I tried to sit up, steadied my hands on the mattress and found myself wrapped in warm, wet sheets. The same drugs that had reduced my cognitive functions to that of a two-year old had done the same to my bladder control.

I began babbling like a drunk.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “So, so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“I’m so embarrassed,” I muttered, the shame literally rolling off my tongue with a small bit of drool. “And I’m so, so sorry.”

The nurse steadied my feet and helped me into the wheelchair. Once settled, she looked me square in the eye as I continued to apologize.

“I work in a hospital,” she said. “This doesn’t faze me.”

A couple hours later, I was shipped home; my soiled underwear wrapped in a plastic bag, my surgically repaired knee set in an immobilizer, the pain blocked by a cocktail of drugs strong enough to paralyze a bull. In my case, they left me blissfully unaware of the surgeon’s handiwork – a freshly drilled hole in my femur through which he attached my new ACL.

The week that followed was worse than the surgery itself, and far worse than the hit that finished my season. A nerve block left me only vaguely aware of the reconstructed knee, and a spinal dose of morphine had numbed everything below the waist, which, incidentally, was responsible for my post-op incontinence. On top of that, my doctor kept my bloodstream flooded with Vicodin and Oxycontin, leaving each brain cell with that fresh, just-scrubbed-with-bleach feeling.

Two days out of the hospital and I couldn’t decide which I’d rather deal with – the throbbing pain in my knee when I didn’t take my pills or the blathering imbecile they created when I did. By the time I woke up on the fourth day, I could only see a series of odd shapes, and I clutched the sides of my skull, certain that someone had driven a railroad spike through my brain. I rolled out of bed and crawled into the bathroom, threw back the porcelain lid and heaved my guts into the toilet. I spent the rest of the day staring at the ceiling, a base drum raging in the back of my head, keeping perfect rhythm with my heartbeat.

Through process of elimination, Oxycontin found the trash and I stopped puking.

It’s been a few weeks since surgery. Major pain has subsided and my follow-up appointments have gone well. Physical therapy is a new challenge with barely perceptible progress. My “Russian stim” sessions are particularly nauseating; an electronic pulse is delivered through a pair of electrodes attached to my quadriceps and shocks me intermittently over the course of 10 minutes in the hopes of waking up the dormant muscle, which, after surgery, deteriorated from healthy and hard to something more akin to a bowl of Jello.

You can save your sympathies for someone who deserves them. What I’m going through right now is painful and disgusting, but I chose this, knowing full well the potential for serious injury. None of that foresight stopped me from joining the Storm and giving tackle football one more go. As I told my teammates in a short speech I delivered at our year-end banquet last weekend, there’s a good reason most football players stop after their high school and college years have passed, and I was living proof standing before them, hunched over a pair of crutches.

But semi-pro football players, myself included, lack the ability to say when. The desire to reclaim former abilities and re-ignite the associated feelings of accomplishment often overwhelms our better judgment, though one could argue that many football players have deficient reasoning centers to begin with. That’s not a knock. I actually mean it as a compliment, and it’s likely one of the reasons I never made it far as a player. To be truly great, you can’t care about what happens when you’re running full speed into what often feels like a car crash, and I’ve only ever been able to suspend my obsession with physical consequence for short periods of time. You’re talking about someone whose fear of heights forces him to crouch low to the ground when he gets near a window in a tall building, someone who once got a case of vertigo so severe when he stared up at the Bennington Monument that he began hyperventilating and had to go wait out in the car, the stationary obelisk safely at his back.

Can a guy like that become a good football player? Maybe if he works his butt off. But a great football player? Never.

Then again, I never set out to be a great football player. I only set out to see what makes them tick. I set out to see why men far past their physical prime couldn’t give up this game. My columns throughout the year allowed me to play out a fantasy as a very poor-man’s George Plimpton, gave me a chance to think out loud, and to highlight some of these men. In the end, all I learned was that there is no definitive answer to our own self-destructive nature.

Bob Kurtzner, the team’s strength and conditioning coach and a former college wide receiver was similarly fascinated by this question. One night after practice, he shrugged his shoulders and offered an open-ended theory.

“There’s a lot going on between the ears of someone who would do this,” he told me. “Either they never got to take it as far as they wanted to, or they want to prove that they can still do it. There are a lot of guys on this team, so there are a lot of different reasons.”

While the answer to that question didn’t offer that neat tie-up to all the loose ends that every writer looks for, I only thought coming into this that there was the potential to find one great story. It turns out I found more than 50 great stories, a lucky turn of events, but one that broke my heart because I only got to touch on a few of them.

I owe a lot to the friends I made on this team, particularly Bill Hay, who found he had a new shadow after the first day of tryouts who forced him to explain the ins and outs of our offense and defense. I’m a lousy study partner, but Bill and tight end Tim Smith were gracious, and acted as walking cheat sheets for me throughout the year. The thanks could go on for another 1,000 words, and would eventually name every player on the team. Those not named still know who they are, and are owed a debt of gratitude.

Playing with the Storm was more fun than I ever thought possible, but my future in semi-pro football is very much in question. Few can afford to limp around injured for six months at a time, and my new – and thankfully temporary – handicap has been a burden to a lot of people in my life. I owe it to them to think this through for a long while before jumping back in.

Either way, I hereby declare whatever decision I make to be subject to change for the rest of my life. Many of my teammates said long ago they would never play again, only to find that the game had stalked them for the rest of their adult lives, and dragged them out of warm, cozy living rooms right in front of their children.

The only real lesson in any of this is that you never say never, and the only thing worse than getting seriously hurt is admitting that you were too scared to throw yourself into the eye of the storm.

“I, of the Storm” from the Bennington Banner, Saturday, December 15, 2007

Note: Assistant Sports Editor Matt Tuthill recently underwent ACL reconstruction on his left knee for an injury sustained in his third game with the Southern Vermont Storm. His cleat stuck in a clump of grass and he was blocked to the turf, tearing the ligament and medial meniscus. The season has been finished for more than two months, but the lingering effects have turned out to be more than he bargained for. In his final “I, of the Storm” column, he explains why.