| Injured lacrosse player travels the long road back BY MIKE UNGER Lauren Lane was racing up the sideline, cradling the ball in her stick while fending off a George Mason defender trying to ride her out of bounds. It was the first day of March, and the AU women’s lacrosse team was playing its third game of a season that held much promise for Lane, a junior attacker. “I planted my right leg, and when she pushed me, I tried to stop myself with my left leg,” Lane said. As she pivoted back toward the middle of the field, Lane’s left foot became entangled in the artificial turf—and didn’t give. “You kind of feel a pop and your knee gives out,” she said. “I didn’t know what happened, I just knew that something didn’t feel right. I couldn’t really straighten it. It felt like a really, really, really bad charley horse.” After being helped off the field, Lane sat on the bench, pain shooting through her knee and tears streaming down her cheek. “My mouth guard’s still on the field,” she told AU head athletic trainer Sean Dash. “You won’t need that today,” he replied. The next day an MRI confirmed what Dash and Lane feared but suspected: her anterior cruciate ligament was torn. Her season was over. Each year, 200,000 Americans sustain ACL injuries, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. With surgery and rehabilitation 85 to 92 percent of people with ACL injuries make a total recovery. Despite those promising statistics, for the athletes the journey back to the field can be a trying, exhausting, and lonely one. It’s a path Lane and five other Eagle athletes are now traveling. But even before undergoing surgery, they must come to grips to the fact that their body—the bedrock of any athlete’s career—is broken. “You have to go through a grieving process,” said Dash, who with his assistants is responsible for AU athletes’ rehabilitation from the moment they get out of surgery until they are fully recovered. “Even though it’s not what most people would traditionally think is a grieving process, you’re talking about an athlete that cannot play their sport. When you get to Division I athletics, even if you’re not talking about Florida or Ohio State, you’re still talking about someone who’s dedicated themselves to their sport. They take that very seriously.” Lane spent the night of her injury talking with her parents and her twin sister, Jackie, also an attacker on the AU team. “I was heartbroken,” she said. “I could deal with the pain, but sitting out my junior season watching my sister and my teammates play . . . We work all year for the season, and now I have to sit out. It’s a bummer.” Slowly Lane began to the accept the reality of her injury, and she set her sights on rehab. On Mar. 20 she underwent a two-hour arthroscopic surgery in which pieces of bone from her tibia, patella, and part of her patella tendon were removed. Using an absorbable screw, the graft was then fastened into place where her ACL once was. Groggy, swollen, and sore after the procedure, Lane had no time to rest. She went directly from the surgery center in Chevy Chase to AU’s training room in Bender Arena. “The more you use the knee the better the knee feels,” Dash said. “When you have surgery you’re naturally going to not want to do things, but the worst thing you can do is sit there with your knee up. They’ve just had surgery; they’re very tentative; they don’t want to use it, but the next day they’re going to go through five to six hours of rehab. We get the fear factor out of the way right away in a controlled environment.” The five to six month process begins in earnest the day after surgery. For the first 10 to 14 days, the athlete endures two multihour sessions every day, seven days a week. “We use everything that we have available here: pool workouts, cycling, a lot of strengthening, functional strengthening, body weight motion,” Dash said. “With an ACL injury you want to make sure the quads are strong, and we focus on the hamstring. The stronger the hamstrings are the better they are to control the knees.” The rehabilitation bar for athletes is considerably higher than it is for the general public, for which only a return to pain-free low-impact motion is sought. “Our ultimate goal is that they are a better, stronger athlete than they were when they came to us,” Dash said. “The goal is a return to unlimited activity, and for a college athlete that means they have to be able to play their sport.” Rehab can be as emotionally taxing as it is physically grueling. While their teammates practice, Lane and two other lacrosse players who suffered the same injury toil in the training room. “Naturally you feel a little removed because you’re not with them, but the coaches made a point to tell us that they’re adamant about us being a part of the team,” Lane said. Lane is now “down” to about two and a half hours of rehab a day, a regimen she’ll be repeating for months to come. She scrapped her plans to return to Long Island this summer; instead, she’ll remain in Washington. With no possibility of a professional lacrosse career looming on the horizon, it would be understandable if Lane came to the conclusion that the hours, days, months of sweat and pain just weren’t worth it. “That didn’t even cross my mind,” she said. “That would be something I would regret for the rest of my life. I love playing the game, and I couldn’t imagine going to school without playing lacrosse. I never even considered that I would get hurt, but you have to realize that you’re not invincible. It can change at any second. Now I’ll play as hard as I can knowing how unhappy I was sitting out. I won’t hold back.” |
