Myself
Volume 2
I worked from 7am to 6pm, not necessarily wise after the weekend I’d had and the week I was looking forward to—a very good example of not learning from past mistakes—but being broke doesn’t always lead one to make the wisest decisions. So after working an eleven-hour shift, I lugged my ass to Kingsway, picked up my gear and then headed to Gleason’s for a sparring session that might well go down in the history books as one of the worst. OK, in hindsight, after gaining a little perspective, it wasn’t THAT bad but it wasn’t very good either. The latter rounds were horrible. In the ring with Cara (our 119 and this year’s Gloves champ at that weight), I felt stifled. I couldn’t find her and kept walking right into her stiff right hands. She bruised my nose and broke some capillaries under my left eye. I freaked out.
The ride home from Gleason’s on the F (out of Brooklyn, through Manhattan and back around into Queens) is always long, but that night it was endless. Convinced I’d been damaged, totally sure that she’d knocked something loose, that my brain was bleeding, that it had been separated from my skull, the anxiety became so intense I wanted to scream out. My iPod battery was dead so I didn’t even have music to drown out the obsessive thoughts running roughshod through my punch-drunk mind. “You’re fine.” I kept repeating over and over to myself. “She didn’t even hit you that hard, the shots were just clean. You weren’t moving your head enough.” At the root of it all was the painful realization that she'd caught me as much as she did because I'd been trying to avoid her. All of the sudden, and without explanation, I was afraid of getting hit.
I woke up feeling OK and then as the day wore on, I felt myself getting progressively more and more nauseous. I’d been worried about making weight but it was NOT going to be a problem: I had absolutely no desire to eat. I attributed the nausea, of course, to the concussion Cara had definitely given me the night before and had the following conversation with myself:
Shit. I have to go see my doctor before Friday. I need an MRI. I won’t be able to fight without it. Hey, wait, why is my heart racing? I’m going to vomit. OK, no I’m not. Oh God, I’m dying. I’m trapped. I have to spar tonight but what if Vanessa finishes the job Cara started? What if one of Ness’ big left hooks to the head jostles loose the piece of brain dangling precipitously off of my frontal lobe? I’ll be dead by morning. Maybe I’m already dead. Can you people see me? I need a Myoplex or my stomach is going to eat itself.
It all started, I think, with something I’d read online or seen on the news or heard from someone somewhere at some point over the last few weeks about a boxer who’d been knocked around during a fight, thought he was fine, and then months later collapsed and died after being barely touched by another opponent. It’s called Second Impact Syndrome and my USA Boxing fight book includes three paragraphs of information in miniscule font all about it. Sometimes being well informed is a bad thing. To distract my mind from the perils of SIS, Big John Henry and I decided to see my friend Amy’s movie Heights. Sadly, I was unable to pay much attention. Not because the film isn’t a thoroughly engrossing, well-written exploration of urban angst and gender warfare, or even because the nutty LOL sitting in front of us lost her hearing aid and spent 20 minutes screaming about how expensive it was, but because I’M CRAZY.
I already knew this, of course, but had been unwilling to admit it for fear of looking like a total wuss. I suppose I'd been waiting for someone else to tell me that it was OK to be apprehensive.