Amber Randall
Instructor Garza-Horne
Composition 1301 - online
Spring 2014
My Bum Leg “Amber are you okay?! “As my teammates ran towards me I knew I was down and I knew I was hurt but I had no idea of what kind was to come. Two years ago in the eleventh grade I tore my ACL, LCL, meniscus and fractured my tibia playing soccer and like any other soccer injury I doubted the seriousness of the situation, went home on crutches and iced my "sore" knee. This may have been one of the worst decisions of my life and it may have been the best but either way it goes, it created a great learning experience. This experience alone has taught me a lot about myself, how to overcome adversities and how to make a way out of no way. After the game I was told by a trainer that it was probably just a bad sprain but to see a doctor anyway. Being the careless individual that I was I decided to go home and not see a doctor. This decision set back therapy time, surgery effectiveness, and my healing process and even caused permanent damage and most embarrassing, a limp that I will have for the rest of my life....at least it seemed that way. Eventually I realized that I was in pain and something was wrong but I did not see a doctor until a month after the injury and after I played two more games on my injured knee. After seeing a doctor I was told that I would never play sports again, I would always walk with a limp and that I wouldn't gain more than 65% of mobility back in my leg even after surgery and therapy. I left the doctor's office that day with crushed dreams. I saw my plans for being a collegiate softball player go down the drains and that was enough to leave me discouraged and depressed. For a while I gave up, wasted money on therapy that I did not take seriously and in a sense completely sabotaged my myself but it did not take long for my
Mom to come up with a way to encourage me and to find a way for me to stop feeling sorry for myself. I finished my senior year in high school on a bummed leg and crushed spirits but that quickly changed when my Mom encouraged me to seek other options and to apply to an Engineering camp at Texas A&M for the summer before college started. It took only a matter of days for me to realize I had a love for solving problems and Engineering was the way to go. There was only one problem. Just walking around A&M that summer and trying to keep up with the other campers I knew that being a college student at a big university would be hard to maintain with a leg that I could barely walk on. Keeping this