My Injuries (So Far)

Over the last nine months now that I've been doing my Hybrid Martial Arts I've had my fair share of bumps and bruises as one would. And this blog is a list of the injuries I've had so far, with many more to come I would assume.

I remember after my first few weeks of training I discovered bruises on my arms while taking a shower, this would then become the start of a long string of injuries to all different parts of my body. Bruises soon disappear and no one ever sees my arms anyway, so I wasn't too worried about my bruises.

I've had cuts on my feet, and the ways I got them were quite weird, though I only remember one, which was from someone else while wrestling with them. Apparently, they somehow, using their toenail, assumingly on their big toe, dug it into my foot and cut it. Which I didn't feel at the time, until I looked at my foot and saw blood. But cuts heal pretty fast and didn't require major medical attention. I've also had a cut on my hand, which I've now forgotten how I got, except that I know it was from training.

My other toe injury was similar to my toe tombstone blog back in March, where my toenail bent backwards, except this time it was only the top part, so I was easily pushed back down and is currently healing itself. Must remember to keep my toenails cut short.

Other cuts included my elbows, the first time due to elbow training where we practiced elbow shots on a pad, to the point where it started to bleed, showing both my seriousness in training, and silliness at not knowing when to slow down. Those healed up eventually, but soon enough, getting thrown onto the ground during training, landing on my elbows and scraping them lead to scraped elbows, eventually leading to scabbed elbows. Those heal okay over time too.

Then there are cuts that matter, because they're seeable and generally don't look very pleasing. The only seeable cuts I've received were to my face, the lips to be exact. The first time it was cut was when I was wrestling a rather aggressive person, who I've continued to wrestle, despite my not wanting to wrestle him at times. At some point I was on my back, and he was on top, he came down with an elbow to do a move and must've mistimed or something and instead came down with the elbow to my face, specifically my mouth. He looked up and said "You're bleeding!!", I touched my lips and saw a lot of blood, and got up to clean it out with water. Its quite amazing how much blood can be in your lip, my instructor took a look at it and said "It was alright", but then he would've seen much worse himself, I hadn't. But basically I had a piece of my lip skin hanging out, which stung when water was applied. That took a while to heal up.
Other occasions with a busted lip were of less drama, either me bumping into someone with my face, or them bumping into my face causing the lip to bleed. I've since started wearing a mouth guard to give my mouth a bit more protection and to protect my lips a lot more. Don't want to hurt my lips!

The other type of injury I've had are ones that no one can see, and only I can feel, those being that of pain. I've had both my arms stretched out a lot due to arm bars, possibly leaving my elbows to deteriorate slowly but surely, but most people are good with arm bars and won't crank my arm to the point of breakage. Though one time at training someone had their arm broken, resulting in a visit to the hospital.

I was once thrown onto my head, which hurt, a lot, and probably rattled my brain. So I try to be very cautious with takedowns and the like now. I've also hurt my pinky toe, due to a takedown where the guy was trying to take me down and I tried to stop it and post with my left foot, but it kinda got stuck and my pinky toe got stretched backwards, which hurt, a lot.

One submission we do a lot in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu are chokes, usually finding someway to constrict a person's breathing and causing them to submit. These are probably my favourite kind of submissions, but not favourite to receive and often after training, I would wake up the next morning with a sore neck due to the chokes I've received.

Last, but not the least is my most recent injury. One that I wanted to avoid since getting into this martial art, and that is cauliflower ear, which if you get a lot of, results in a pretty ugly looking ear, all puffed up and whatnot. The way you get this is if you suffer blows to your ears, or pressure put upon them, which can happen a lot during wrestling. I had always been careful, or at least tried to be careful and protect my ears as best as possible but at somepoint I developed a little 'lump' in my left ear, but it was very small and I thought it was nothing of concern, except that when I put pressure onto it, it would hurt. So sleeping on my left side was often difficult because of the lump. However, this got worse last night, after training, while I was at bible study I reached up to feel my left ear and felt what was a pretty substantial lump, at some point during wrestling I must've put a lot of pressure on my ear and the lump grew big. This lump, is basically a blood clot, so it was filled with blood, I didn't want it to hang around anymore or else it would've settled and I would've had a slightly fatter ear than my right ear, something I didn't want.
Today I went to see the doctor to get the blood drained out, which the doctor did, but only found there to be a little bit of blood inside, according to the doctor it'll take 10 days to heal, so I'll try to limit my physical activity over the next 10 or so days. Which is quite difficult, with a (un)friendly bout with Andrew Ha tomorrow and my third stripe grading on Monday for BJJ, followed by Thai Kickboxing grading on the Tuesday, and a BJJ competition that I want to enter at the end of the month, I'm going to have to protect my ears very well. I'm not a vain person, but I'd like to keep my facial area generally intact, not for my sake, but for yours, since you guys have to look at me from time to time.