In the heart of football season with only 3 games left, I felt a knot  in my neck before practice. I went to our trainer and she told me I should sit out of practice that day, as I did sit out my neck began to increasingly get more painful.  By the time I was heading home I told my mom I needed to go to the hospital. When I got there my neck was very swollen and hurt horribly. The doctors wanted to do an X-ray right away, and the results were not good.  The doctor told us he thought I had a bulging disc and wanted to schedule an MRI for me. Since this was a pretty serious injury I got my MRI two days later, and by the fourth day, I had my results. It was a bulging disc and nerve damage.  I had to make countless trips to my specialists office and the last conversation we had was about football. He told me he understood that I still wanted to play but with a bulging disc, it only takes a little hit to make it rupture, and if it did, I would be paralyzed from the neck down.  I knew that playing football wasn’t worth being paralyzed but I also knew that football was my life. We came to the heartbreaking decision that I shouldn’t play and realized that my health is more important than a game.

Throughout my life football has been everything for me.  Yes, I played other sports like baseball and basketball and such but football was it for me.  I was always bigger than the rest of the kids so that gave me an advantage from the beginning. In 4th grade, my first year playing football, I played for the 7th grade team and started on both sides of the ball.  I’ve played football my whole life and when I wasn’t in the field I was in the gym. If I wasn’t working out or playing football I was watching the Giants, Michigan State, or highlights. Even now that I can’t play football anymore I still spend almost all of my time doing something involving football.  I love the game; I hate not being able to play. Every day I think about just risking it and start playing again, but the thought of being paralyzed from the neck down is pretty scary.

My football career has been unfortunate you could say.  I’ve had a lot of injuries and I’ve played through a lot of injuries; in 7th grade, I tore my meniscus, in 8th grade I sprained my knee, which isn’t too bad but I still had to sit out for a couple weeks.  Freshman year I hurt the same knee I did before and then sophomore year, last year is when I hurt my neck. For something I love so much, it hasn’t been too kind to me. I never cared about the injuries, I never cared about what I was doing to my body with this sport.  The only thing I cared about was playing, I loved the hitting, the competition, the team play, everything about football was amazing for me so why would I care about if I was destroying my body? I didn’t care. That is until last year. The pain I went through and the recovery, I was literally in bed for a month straight. It hurt to move. I hated every second I was in my bed and not playing football, not going to school. That’s when I realized that the outcome of this injury was much, much worse than not being able to play football. Even though I can’t play football anymore, I can get out of bed in the morning, I can walk, I can do all these simple things that the universe takes advantage of, and I know that if I played football all of that could be taken away, and it’s not worth it.