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Juan

Rhodes School , River Grove , Illinois

After getting told that it could be a complete tear, my parents went into shock. On a dark night on a Friday, it was game day for my football team. We started out the game as normal, and it was a pretty close game. But they started to run away with it during the 3rd quarter. They had just scored a touchdown and were kicking it back off. As I was running my foot got stuck in the turf, and my leg twisted inwards while my body went outwards. I had to be helped off the field.

Once they took me off the sideline, they kept giving me questions and I kept answering them and they gave me a cold spray and wrap to go back in. After I went back in, I felt the pain, but still continued. After the game I woke up the next morning in immense pain, and it was hard to move my leg. I was still limping. My dad waited it out a couple days while icing it and realized we would have to go to the doctor. At the doctor, we answered some of his questions and we gave an idea of where it was hurting and where I was feeling the pain. He started to move my knee around and did it with both knees to see if something was wrong. That thing he was trying to see was my ACL. The ACL is a serious ligament in your knee that if torn makes walking very difficult.

As he was moving my knee though he realized that it was in fact my ACL. As the ACL locks out the knee when it starts to pull away from it each. It would lock and keep it together as it was the stability of the knee. He started to explain that since my knee on my right had more movement when pulling on it the ACL could be torn a little bit or a great amount causing surgery. My mom didn’t love those words and started to feel upset about it. She didn’t like that I would have to go through all of that as how it was explained. He was saying to take precautions about that and told us what we should be doing.

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