Old enough to know better

Last weekend we went up north to join our friends at their cottage in central Wisconsin. Somewhere between the eating and drinking and chatting I looked out over the channel at the edge of the back yard and thought "That ice looks thick enough to me." I slowly walked out onto the ice to the middle of the channel and confirmed that it was OK. I swept away the light snow that had covered the surface to reveal the perfect clear dark ice that comes from a slow windless freeze. It was about four inches thick, just enough for ice skating.

I grabbed some snow shovels and the younger boy and I got to work clearing an ice rink while the rest of the crew were off in the woods avoiding the hunters and shooting paint balls. By the time they got back we had cleared a large patch of ice complete with cut-outs at the end for hockey goals. The elder boy and his friend dug out the hockey sticks and some pucks and we put together an impromptu skate less two on two hockey game.

We were all in our gym shoes, we had three hockey sticks and a broom with a broken off handle (with some tape on the end to dull the sharp point) and a few pucks in case we lost one in the snow. I took the broomstick and the small boy for my team and we took to the ice. I can't say the action was fast and furious, it took all we had just to move across the ice without skates but we put up a good game and, playing first to five it was soon over with a score of 5 to 3. I don't even remember which team won we were having so much fun.

We mixed up the teams and I swapped the younger boy for the older one and we started again. Sliding up and down the ice making spectacular slow motion saves it was soon tied up with the game winning point on the line. We faced off, won the puck and started driving it around the ice when I got tangled up with my opponent. There's that moment when you lose your balance when time seems to stop and you realize how fast the brain works and I found myself in it.

The only part of my body touching the ice was a little bit of my left heel and the tilt sensor in my brain sent out the request for possible damage reports. The elbows wanted no part of this and replied with an image of shattered bones locked in a cast and the wrists reminded the brain of the healing time required for the recent surgery from which one of them had just recovered. The spine showed a graph of the stiffness and recovery time that would be required if it were to be slapped against the ice and requested a different option while the skull reported the density of ice and followed that with a recording of the sound of a skull hitting a hard surface.

Time was short and before the rest of the body could answer it was voted on and decided that we would aim for the ass. As the last bit of heel left the ice and the legs went up, so did the arms back and head in slow motion, all trying to avoid a hard impact with the ice. Then time returned to normal speed and slammed me down onto the ice, landing directly on the back of my hip bone right at the top. My spine reverberated with the crash, popping all the way up, one vertebrae at a time until the impact reached my skull and gave the brain a little shock as well. The rest of my body dropped lightly to the ice.

I gathered my senses, checked my extremities and tried to move. Nothing too bad, arms and legs OK, brain still intact. I knew I couldn't just sit up so I slowly rolled over to my knees and stood with the help of my fellow players. I announced my retirement from the game as they helped me off the ice. There was no applause from the crowd as the injured player was led away like at other sporting events, just the general concern and amazement that I'm not actually dead.

As I walked up toward the house I could feel the pain in my left leg growing and with each step walking grew more difficult. I knew that if I stopped moving all would be over so i tried to "walk it off" but the discomfort kept increasing and I had to sit down. Remedies were offered and it seems that everybody has Vicodin in their pocket these days but it was decided that I needed Midol. I swallowed a pair of the cramp relieving muscle relaxers and washed them down with a few shots of apple pie, grabbed an ice pack and laid down for a while.

For the next two hours I tried to find comfortable positions, 20 minutes on and 20 minutes off with the ice pack and surprisingly started to feel better. It wasn't long before I was moving around almost normally as if nothing had even happened. We cooked dinner, I fried the turkey and helped with the other chores and by the end of the evening we had fed fifteen people, played Pictionary and I was fine, just a little pain at the point of impact. Fearing the worst, I went to bed with the last two Midol in me expecting to wake up stiff but I was relieved the next morning when I could actually walk. I must have hit a nerve but caused no lasting damage, that in itself is a victory for me.

I learned several things that afternoon that should be common sense but will probably be forgotten before the next opportunity arises. One is that a man should be more careful playing ice hockey in his gym shoes with three other people whose combined age is only a few years greater than that of his own. Two, women have the best available over the counter medicine and three, a good story is sometimes worth a little bit of pain and suffering. I'm going to go buy some Midol now, just in case.