Chapter 66: Jo Farrar
The room at the back of the gym on Padgett Street is three metres by four, which is the size of my flat, and I noticed that immediately. The gym itself is downstairs and you can hear a bar being dropped through the floor about every ninety seconds.
A plinth against one wall.
A mirror. Six resistance bands on a hook, sorted by colour.
A wall chart of a shoulder with the deltoid peeled off it.
Jo Farrar is about forty-five, shorter than me, with forearms and a hockey scar across one shin that she did not explain.
“Sit up there. Shirt off or a vest, whichever.”
I had brought a vest.
She did not start with the shoulder. She started with a sheet of paper and eleven minutes of questions.
When. How. What was the mechanism.
I said: uchi-mata in training, my partner's weight came back over the top, and my arm went behind me and stayed there while the rest of me kept going. I was twenty. It was a Tuesday and I finished the session.
“Dislocated?”
“Subluxed. It went back in on its own before I got off the mat.”
“Which is worse for you and better for the story,” she said.
She asked what the surgery was. I told her: labral repair, four anchors, keyhole.
She asked what happened after.
Nineteen months. Return-to-sport testing three times.
Failed on the third.
She wrote all of it down without looking up, and she did not once say that she was sorry, which I was grateful for.
Then she asked the question I was not ready for.
“What do you want to be able to do?”
Nobody had asked me that since I was twenty-one, and at twenty-one the answer was a weight class and a date.
I said I did not know.
“Then I'll ask it differently. Is there something specific?”
“I want to be able to land.”
She looked up.
“Land as in fall over, or land as in be thrown?”
“Be thrown.”
She put the pen down and said right, and then she spent forty minutes on me.
I am going to write the numbers down, because they are the only completely honest thing anybody gave me that whole spring.
Forward flexion, passive, lying down: left one hundred and seventy-two degrees. Right one hundred and fifty-four.
Abduction: left one hundred and seventy-six. Right one hundred and forty-eight, with pain from about eighty-five to a hundred and twenty and then less pain above it.
“That arc is the interesting part,” she said. “Remember that it stops hurting at the top.”
External rotation, arm out at ninety degrees, the position you are in when somebody has your sleeve above your head: left eighty-eight degrees, right fifty-two.
Internal rotation, hand behind the back, measured by which vertebra you can touch: left to the bottom of the shoulder blade. Right to the top of the pelvis.
Grip strength, both hands, on a dynamometer: thirty-nine kilos left, thirty-eight right. She made me do it three times each and took the best.
“Your hand is fine. Your hand is better than fine.”
External rotation strength, same machine, elbow at the side: fourteen point four kilos on the left. Nine point one on the right.
“Sixty-three per cent,” she said.
Then she stood behind me and put two fingers on the bottom tip of my right shoulder blade and asked me to raise my arm and lower it slowly.
“Again.”
“Again, slower.”
“Right. Look in the mirror this time.”
Coming down, at about ninety degrees, the bottom corner of the blade lifts off my back. You can see it.
It looks like something under a sheet.
I have had that for twelve years and never once seen it, because you cannot see your own back, and nobody had ever stood behind me and said look.
The last test was the one I did not like.
She lay me on my back with my right arm out and bent at ninety, and she took it slowly backwards, and at about fifty degrees my whole body did something.
Not pain. My abdominals fired and my left hand came off the plinth and my chin came down.
“That's apprehension,” she said, taking it back. “That's not you being dramatic. That's a joint telling a nervous system it's about to leave.”
“It doesn't hurt.”
“No. It's worse than hurting.
“Pain you can push through. That, you can't, and you shouldn't.”
She wrote for a while.
I sat on the edge of the plinth with my feet not quite reaching the floor, which is a position I had not been in since I was twelve years old in a room on Vernon Street.
“Do you want it soft or straight?”
“Straight.”
“Get dressed and sit in the chair,” she said. “It'll take about ten minutes and you'll want to be wearing clothes for it.”