Beautiful Vibe

Wrestling...not a good idea

My husband and I signed up for a class called Combat Submission Wrestling. While other couples go to marriage counseling and talk about their feelings, we wrestle it out. If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said this was a great cathartic exercise. Nothing says I love you like pushing your partner down and choking them out. However, this week I'm not exactly singing its praises.

For those of you who don't know what Combat Submission Wrestling is, it's as brutal and primal as it sounds. It combines everything from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Greco-Roman wrestling, Muay Thai boxing, street fighting and all around viciousness. If you've ever watched an Ultimate Fighting Championship, that's pretty much what it is. The main goal is to either choke someone out which means getting them in a headlock and making them lose consciousness (people will "tap out" before this happens and you're supposed to let go and allow the blood to continue flowing to their head. How nice), or just get them into some kind of joint lock that submits your opponent. Sounds lovely, no?

When we first started, the class had a few guys that had been doing it for years and they were extremely nice and helpful while kicking the crap out of us. That's really all I can ask. If you're going to kick my ass, please do so nicely. I never felt that my safety was jeopardized. I was learning, being challenged and having fun. However, over the last few weeks, the demographic of the class has drastically changed. It went from experienced, nice people who want to help teach you, to gung-ho twenty year olds who have no concept of control and just want to beat you. They don't take into consideration that neither my husband or I have a wrestling background and that we're 11-17 years older than they are. Let's just say we don't recover from a beating quite as quickly as they do.

The turning point from fun and interesting to not-so-fun and dangerous happened about 3 weeks ago. This one kid, I'll call him James, competes in UFC like tournaments on a smaller scale. He has been wrestling for about 9 years and is as intense as you can get. Even while doing sit-ups he was yelling at my husband, Paul, to "CRANK OUT ONE MORE, DO IT MAN. COME ON!!!!! LADIES LOVE TIGHT ABS!" I appreciate him encouraging the tight abs, because yes, ladies do love them, but later in class I saw this kid pull a move that made me hold my breath and just hope that the other kid was going to get up.

James and another kid were facing each other, down on their knees. James had the other guy in a front headlock and the other guy was trying to wiggle out of it. While the kid's head was still in a really tight headlock, James spun his entire body around in a 360 degree circle, causing the other kid to flip 360 degrees, too. I thought for sure the kid's neck was going to be dangling from his body like a wet noodle when they were done. I know if I had been in that situation, I wouldn't have spun with it because I had no idea you could do something like that. I would have resisted and consequently had my neck broken. Paul and I were stunned and silent as we watched this. Right after that, James ran out of the school which I thought was odd, and he puked. If anyone should have been puking it was the other guy.

When James came back into the studio, he said, "I took a knee in the head last week and ever since then I can't keep food down, I'm dizzy all the time and I'm seeing spots." He says this casually as though head trauma is a mere nuisance like indigestion and traffic jams. He says he can't go to the doctor because he doesn't have insurance. What the hell??? I recognize that this class doesn't necessarily attract philosophers and rocket scientists, but it seems like insurance should be a pre-requisite to be in a class like this. It's not a question of if you're going to get hurt, it's just a matter of when and how bad.

Okay, so that event got me a little nervous and thinking maybe yoga and swimming looked like better options for me and my expanding ass. In the first few weeks of training, I had hurt my left wrist. Then, one night I woke up with excruciating pain in my first two fingers on my left hand. It was like they had been smashed in a car door. Every night since then, the joints seem to flare up and it hurts to move them. That's no good for a left-handed musician. Now I'm being treated for tendonitis. But that's nothing. Here's where things stopped going just a little wrong and went really wrong.

Paul was wrestling with one of the new guys. He was on the bottom bunched up in a ball with his head on the mat. Assuming the fetal position is about all you can do when someone is wailing on you. The guy put all of his weight on Paul's upper body, and Paul rolled over on his neck with a 160 pound man on top of him. Paul immediately grabbed the back of his neck and was grunting, moaning, obviously in a lot of pain. He couldn't pick his head up.

The odd thing was that the teacher didn't stop the class. He asked Paul to get out of the way so other people could keep wrestling. Granted, Paul has pulled a muscle in his neck before and the teacher had seen it before, but this looked different than anything I had seen Paul go through. He was also grabbing his neck in a different place. By the end of class, Paul could not move without wincing. Getting him into the car was a nightmare and every little bump in the road on the way home made him scream in pain.

Paul doesn't like to go the doctor, so he just wanted to go home and get in bed. By the time he woke up the next morning he said to me, "I can't move." I noticed he was in the exact same position he was when he went to sleep and that freaked me out a bit. I said "You mean you can't move your limbs or you just can't move your neck?" Not that either one of those is good, but I was at least hoping the limbs could move. Turned out it was just his neck. He struggled for 15 minutes to get out of the bed and it was horrible watching him try to flail about. I couldn't do anything to help and he was just getting angry at himself. He growled, "I feel like a freaking invalid."

After getting him dressed, down the stairs and into the car, the ride to the hospital was plagued with potholes and accompanied by squeals of pain. When we got checked into the ER, the admissions person called a tech to put a neck collar on him. At first Paul refused and the lady got tough and said the following words. "You can refuse the collar, but if you have a broken neck, you're making a really dumb decision." Broken neck! We were stunned. We hadn't thought about that for some reason. Paul has a neck muscle spasm thing that acts up every few years, so that's really all we were thinking was wrong with him. But then I replayed the scene in my mind and the unnatural way his neck had bent with his own body weight on it and that of another grown man's on top.

The ER was busy that day. I sat in the hall while Paul was in a hospital bed against the wall. For 4 hours I thought about how much he had moved since the accident and if his neck had been broken, what damage had been done. I watched a lady who was 4 months pregnant with severe chest pains and a nose ring writhe and gasp for breath. I saw a lady who was cleaning her pool just an hour before brought in on a stretcher; her foot a bloody mess, dangling precariously from her leg. I saw things I typically only see on TV with commercial breaks.

Hospitals are full of people whose stories all start with "I was supposed to be's." "I was supposed to be flying to Vegas today..." "I was supposed to be at a baseball game..." "I was supposed to be this or that." The hours between admittance and diagnosis are filled with "If only's...." I sat there watching my husband lie in a hospital bed immobilized thinking "If only I hadn't told him about this class," "If only we'd gone to the hospital last night," "If only, if only, if only..." Then I went through the "What if's..." "What if he's paralyzed, what if he can't work any more, what if he can't drive again..." The whole "for better or worse" part of the vows really come to life when you're in a place where so many lives are forever changed and the "for worse" part stares you in the face.

After the 4th hour, the nurse finally came and said his neck wasn't broken. We were extremely relieved to hear the news. He got a shot of painkillers and shortly thereafter fell asleep. It turns out he had torn his trapezius muscle. Not that that's a great thing, but at least it's not a broken neck. Needless to say, we have stopped taking Combat Submission Wrestling. I don't like to quit things, but it's definitely not worth risking that kind of injury again. Fortunately our marriage is happy and healthy, so I think we can skip the counseling and the ass kicking for awhile.

posted by T. @ 12:22 PM