A year on injury rehab can feel like forever
The return of Stampeders receiver Rambo highlights battle of long-term recovery
The time passes awfully slowly when you're trying to rehab an injury.
Ken-Yon Rambo can tell you that.
It will have been 374 days — that's somewhere just north of 32 million ticks of the clock — between the time he was horse collared by B.C.'s Javier Glatt last July and his scheduled return Saturday to the Calgary Stampeders lineup.
That's more than 32 million moments of wondering when his torn anterior cruciate ligament and damaged meniscus would be ready to go. Wondering if the first hit will be a safe one. If his hands are still sweet. If the timing is still there. Wondering what it's going to be like.
Roughriders' Smith snakebit
For football players, Lady Luck can be a vicious mistress.
Wayne Smith, starting left offensive tackle for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, ran out for the team's week two contest at Empire Field in Vancouver, completing a one-year comeback from a torn left Achilles tendon.
A few minutes later he suffered a left knee injury that will likely keep him out for all of this season.
"The good thing is … it's not as bad as the Achilles," Smith told the Regina Leader Post. "The Achilles is fine and I'll be back from this one too."
Smith's second injury resonated through the rest of the league.
"That's tough," said Hamilton defensive back Dylan Barker, who sat out his rookie season with an injury. "He’s been put through so much hard work, and then to go back [on the injured list] again, you feel for guys like that.
"I've been on [long-term] rehab only once, I can't imagine going through it twice."
"It seemed like it was two years ago man, it's been so long, it was just last year, man," said Rambo, a receiver with over 4,000 career yards to his credit in the Canadian Football League.
He was chatting on the phone from Calgary, right after the decision was taken that Saturday was return night, and this was a happy guy.
"I think you go through a lot of emotions, man [with an injury], especially from the get-go when you first get it. I have never had a big injury like this," Rambo says. "It was kind of like it was a little bit disturbing, but it's a thing that I've know guys who had torn ACL's and that nature, and I talked to a lot of guys who went through it and everybody's comeback is different, it varies from six months to 12 months to 16 months."
Athletes tend to have to do things. Have to go places. Have to be part of something. Suddenly, there's a pop, and you aren't part of it anymore. That makes you think.
"You know, you can go to all the meetings, get all the plays, talk to the coaches," Rambo says. "But when they go out on the field, you can't go on the field, that's what you want to do so you can complete the task.
"I love my teammates man, they are like brothers to me [and] I couldn't do anything but cheer my boys on."
Tick, tick, tick.
Dylan Barker knows this tune. He was forced to play it two seasons ago when in his second pre-season game as a Hamilton Tiger-Cats rookie he broke his leg.
Stronger than ever
That first season was spent in rehab and trying to be part of things.
"When you are an athlete on the injury list, one week can feel like months," says Barker, who came back last year stronger than ever and is now a starter in the defensive backfield.
And as much as the team and teammates try to make you part of things, there's nothing you can do to help. Barker had to watch his Cats go 3-15.
"We weren't a very good team, and you're sitting there and you want to get out there," he says, adding the few times there were celebrations, he couldn't really share.
"It's kind of like an empty happiness," Barker says. "They are putting in all this work and going to practice and film and you are with them on the sidelines, but you're not really with them. You can feel isolated."
Rambo was forced to watch his Stampeders lose to Saskatchewan and give up first place in the last game of the 2009 regular season, and then drop another to the Riders in the Western final.
"They were close games, all close games, and it goes to your head, like 'dang, I could have been there and contributed and helped the team,' but all you can do is cheer the team on."
Tick, tick, tick.
In the football world, long-term injury is like being pregnant.
First of all, everyone likes to come up and tell you their own horror stories of what they went through when they had that injury.
Second, you suddenly become an expert on what's happening to you. Rambo, for example, can take you on a tour of his injury.
"You got your ACL [anterior cruciate ligament], you got your MCL [medial collateral ligament], you got your TCL [tibial collateral ligament], you got your meniscus — I could do it all for you," he says, laughing. "I can show you all the ligaments, where it's connected at from the knee to the hamstring to the quad. "I can show you it all, man."
Torn Achilles tendon
Steven Turner knows all about his injury, too.
It's a torn Achilles tendon, suffered by the hot Toronto Argonauts rookie receiver from Bishops on the second day of training camp. Second day. Not even enough time to get your pants dirty.
This was a young man who had run a record time of 4.31 in the 40-yard dash and added an outstanding vertical leap of 43.5 inches at the CFL rookie evaluation camp. He was feeling great.
"The next thing you know, I heard kind of like a pop — like someone kind of stepped on the back of my leg," says Turner, sitting in the press box before the rest of the Argos took on the Calgary Stampeders.
'I'm just really taking it day by day and I have to be happy as best I can.' — Argos rookie receiver Steven Turner on rehabbing an injury
"My leg just started to give out and the next thing you know, I had to get surgery."
Not the type to get down about things, the Brampton native settled into rehab after surgeons sewed the tendon together, put the foot in a hard cast for two weeks [it's since been switched to a walking cast] and sent the young athlete off on a year of days spent getting ready to try again in 2011.
"I'm just really taking it day by day and I have to be happy as best I can," he says. "I wake up, go to the Argos' facility, rehab, hang around practices and meetings — that's basically my day right now. Then I just go home and relax. I'm still highly involved in the football world, it's still my number 1 focus, and I still plan on being on the field next season."
Rules say the Argos don't have to give him any financial help [officially, he was cut by the team after the injury and because he didn't play an exhibition game they don't have to honour his contract], but the club is providing money to help Turner get by.
He says the players have been great, making him feel like he's part of things — so key for a rookie who was hardly there.
"I'll be able to start running again within six months — in January — that's a long time," he says. "It's not nice to not be able to run and walk around, but you have to get over it, now you just have to cherish [the ability to run] a lot more when you run again."
It sure is a long time to next June, though.
"I can't think ahead to next season, I have to think about this time," Turner says. "It's not the greatest thing, it's not the worst. It's never as bad as it seems."
Tick, tick, tick.