I cheated on my Doktor in Ochsenfurt

What would you do for first place? If you're competitive like me, you'd probably do a lot. But what would you do for seventh place...of twelve? Probably not all that much. I mean, at that point you have to own up to the fact that you're worse than half of the other competitors. However, while most people ease up on the gas upon seeing that a top finish isn't in the cards, what do I do for seventh place? I break my knee.

In the last minute of the last game at an indoor ultimate frisbee tournament in Leipzig, Germany I jumped to intercept a pass from an offender waiting in the endzone and landed on a locked right leg. I had caught the frisbee, we won the game (thereby securing a smooth seventh place) and I was whisked away in an ambulance to seek medical attention for my rapidly swelling knee. The EMT's in the ambulance were very nice; at least I think they were. I could only understand every third word of their accented east German which holds very little resemblance to the German I learned in college. It got to the point where I just started asking question after question - about German ambulance technology, their personal journies to becoming EMT's, the history of that bridge that we just crossed - so as to keep them rambling until we got to the hospital. Actually, in the past four months I have become an expert in pretending to understand what people say. Smiles, nods, facial expressions indicating surprise/information processing, appropriately timed exclamations (e.g. Wow! No way! Then what happened?!), or, as perfected in Leipzig, simply asking more questions are all ways to create the effect that you're catching everything when really you haven't the foggiest notion what's being said.

My hospital visit was relatively short (it could have been even shorter had the guy in the gurney behind me not pretended to be Herr Haflich when the x-ray technician called my name on the list) and smelled like sweat. It was short because Sunday evenings in the emergency room are almost always calm and it smelled like sweat because I was sweaty. They x-rayed my knee, gave me a brace which was initially advertised as being 20 euros but turned out to be 120, and offered to sell me crutches which I politely turned down given that with my American insurance I have to pay everything out of pocket. I hobbled out the doors of the emergency department to be greeted by my whole frisbee team, two of which accompanied me on the train home.

The next day back in Würzburg I went to a sports specialist, Herr Doktor Zimmer, who drained my knee with a needle the size of a pencil, sent me to get an MRI, gave me crutches and told me not to bear weight on my right leg for six weeks, all of which he managed to accomplish while wearing pants that were easily three sizes too small. Out of the whole thing, I came away with a mostly ripped outer ligament and hairline fractures in the heads of my femur and tibia.

Initially, the though was that no operation would be necessary. However, one of my coworkers sent my MRI photos to a family friend who is a Doktor, and a knee specialist at that. After he first looked at my pictures, he thought that an operation was all but inevitable and wanted to meet with me. After a long week of uncertainty, I met with him in a dark room in the Ochsenfurt Hosital, twenty minutes outside of Würzburg. As I took off my pants so that he could touch me, I couldn't help but think that I was cheating on Doktor Zimmer with another Doktor whose name I didn't even know. But it was worth it; the drive in the snowstorm, the clandestine meeting in an empty examination room, the torquing and pulling of my injured knee were all things that I would gladly go through again just to hear that everything was going heal up just fine on it's own.

Today, five weeks after the injury, I went back to Doktor Zimmer who had completely forgotten who I was. I had thought that he and I had something special, a Doktor-patient relationship that would endure the four weeks between visits. Alas, it did not. At least his sieve-like memory made me feel less guilty about cheating on him in Ochsenfurt.