One of my teammates, Leah Smith, was the first to come over to me. She said, “Miss, are you okay? What’s going on?”
I had no idea how to answer, so I just burst into tears.
Teri was down toward the other end of the pool. There was a lot going on. She was about to start timing me when my back began to spasm, so she noticed this little bit of commotion around me and came rushing over. She grabbed two members of the medical staff on the way.
One of the big concerns, everybody told me later, was the media. Oh, they were all worried about what was going on with me, but underneath all that there was this separate worry. There were reporters and cameras all over the pool deck, so Teri understandably wanted to get me behind closed doors. She didn’t want the press telling the world that I’d been injured before the medical staff even had a chance to figure out what was going on. Of course, it ended up coming out anyway. There was a Canadian news crew on the scene, and they captured the whole thing. (Let me tell you, that’s a real fun video to watch—and here you can feel free to add just the right level of sarcasm in your head as you read.)
Somehow, they got me off the pool deck and into a more secluded area. I couldn’t walk. I had my arms draped across the shoulders of a coach or trainer on either side of me, and it’s like they were dragging me—I was deadweight. The trainers rushed a massage table over to me, but I couldn’t even lie down on it. If you’ve ever had a back spasm, you’ll know that there’s no way to get comfortable. Your whole body is thrown into a painful clench. When you’re in the middle of it, it’s all you can do to keep from bawling, and I wasn’t even doing such a good job of that.
Lying down hurt.
Sitting up hurt.
Standing hurt.
Finally, I was able to find the least uncomfortable position and lie down on the table so the trainers could work on me. I was on my belly, my face pressed into the little cutout they have at the top, in an absurd amount of pain. Oh my . . . I’m back in a desperate panic just writing about it, reliving those low, low moments. The team doctor was on the scene at this point, and what seemed to me like a whole lot of people running all over the place. I was crying, crying, crying. And Teri—God bless her—she was crying, too. She was with me the entire time, holding my hand, telling me everything was going to be okay, when really, she had no idea if everything would be okay.
It was great that Teri was there with me. I couldn’t have gotten through any of this without her. But, meanwhile, I was still looking around for my mom and dad. The little girl in me wanted my parents to swoop in and wave their magic mommy and daddy wands and make the pain go away. But that’s not how it works, is it? And yet here I was, a college athlete, a national-team swimmer, an Olympian, and all I wanted was to curl up in my mom’s lap and have her tell me everything was going to be okay. To have my dad crack a corny joke to distract me from the pain.
The doctor, Dr. Lynch, asked me a bunch of questions, trying to figure out what was going on, but I couldn’t really answer him, I was in such agony. I do remember that he asked me to rate the pain on a scale of one to ten, the way they always do, and I answered without hesitation: “Ten!”
I have never in my life said any pain was a ten out of ten, and I never thought I would have to. Just hearing that word out of my mouth was terrifying, because I knew what it took to say it.
There was a wonderful massage therapist on hand named Beth, and she was working on me the whole time, trying to get me to relax. She told me later that it felt to her like there was a metal rod in my back. She’d never felt anything like it.
By this point, some of the other swimmers had picked up that something was going on with me, and a few of my friends came by to see how I was doing. Tyler Clary was a godsend—he didn’t leave my side. And weeks later, Dana Vollmer told me that when she heard my answer to the “pain scale” question, she knew I was in bad shape, because for an athlete to rate the pain at a ten out of ten, that’s really saying something. What it’s saying is, “This is not good.”
No, it’s not.
No, it wasn’t.
After a half hour or so, Beth had me feeling looser. The pain was a little more manageable—still super intense, but at least I could breathe. And think. They’d started doing some acupuncture on me, which offered some relief. And the doc was able to give me some pain meds, a muscle relaxer specifically, but only after checking with Global DRO (an online drug reference site that provides athletes with up-to-date information on the prohibited status of specific medications). There are certain approved medications you’re allowed to take when you’re “out of competition,” and another group you’re allowed to take when you’re “in competition,” and even though the Pan Pac meet hadn’t officially started yet we were operating under the “in competition” restrictions, so Teri and the other coaches were careful to make sure I wasn’t in violation.
When it looked like they could move me from the pool to the hotel, they stuffed me in an empty minivan with the seats laid down to make a big bed for me. We were about a half hour away from the hotel, so I was dreading the ride, but I couldn’t stay in that training room forever. Teri sat with me in the trunk, holding my hand and comforting me the whole way. It felt like the drive took just about forever, and I think I cried the entire time.
Teri kept saying, “Don’t even think about the next couple of days. Don’t even think about swimming. We just need to focus on right now, on what we need to do to get you better.”
Meanwhile, Teri had called my parents at their hotel and made arrangements for them to come and meet us where we were staying. I wished I could have been the one to make the call, because I knew if Mom could hear my voice she might not freak out so much, but I’m told they took the news okay and went immediately into rescue mode. That’s how they operate in a crisis.
I ended up going to Teri’s room, because she was on the ground floor, and the doctors and therapists came to check on me there. They gave me some more acupuncture, some more medication.
DAD: We didn’t know what to think. Poor D.A. was about to burst, she was so upset, but at the same time she was scrambling to find out what she could about what had happened. She put on her doctor hat and started asking questions, but then we heard from someone that Missy was talking about swimming the next day. That’s Missy for you. She’s wracked with pain, all knotted up, her back in spasm, and she’s thinking about getting back in the water. “Put me in, Coach.” That was always her thing, but this was new territory for us, this kind of injury. It could have been the worst thing for her, to try to swim, but she let it be known that this was her plan. She started talking about swimming right away, we were told, as soon as the pain started to subside a little. I heard that and didn’t know what to think. It was so aggravating. Here you have your child, who in your mind is still just a little girl, and she’s so determined to push herself you worry she might do some damage to her spine, or put her in some kind of jeopardy for the rest of her life. And here you have these coaches and trainers, trying to help her. And we’re not even on the scene yet, putting all of this together, feeling completely helpless, completely powerless to help our daughter. You want to believe these people have your daughter’s best interests at heart, and they surely did, but at the time you just don’t know. You don’t know what to think.
MOM: We were getting all these different reports about what had happened. I spoke to one of the trainers, and I thought I had a pretty good idea what was going on, but I was still frantic. When your daughter is hurt, you just want to go with her, you just want to be with her. You need to see her with your own eyes, you need to hold her, and cry with her. So that had to be the longest half hour of my life, from the moment we got the call until we were able to get to Missy at the hotel. That’s about how long it was, and it was the most frustrating feeling, knowing there was nothing I could do for her. Knowing she was in such tremendous pain. Oh my goodness, I was such a m
ess. Thank God Dick was with me, so we could support each other. He was just as upset as I was, of course, but he knew there were things we needed to be doing, questions we needed to be asking. So we did what we could to keep each other sane and whole until we could get to Missy’s side.
Poor Mom burst into tears when she came into the room. On the ride over, my father had been telling her to keep it together, reminding her that the medical staff had things under control, pointing out to her that it would have worried me to see my mother looking so upset. She meant to put on a brave face, but she couldn’t help herself. I was her baby girl, and it killed her to see me in such torment. And even though the muscles in my back had started to loosen up a bit, and the pain had started to feel manageable, I was still in agony. Everything is relative. Maybe I’d gone from a ten to a nine on that pain scale. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
It was decided that my parents would stay with me that night. This was decided by my parents, naturally—but Teri and the rest of the coaching staff concurred. Most of the swimmers had roommates, and it wouldn’t have been fair for me to put one of my teammates through that kind of ordeal right before a big competition, but it had worked out that I had a room to myself.
I don’t think I could have gotten through that night without my parents. They had to help me shower, help me go to the bathroom, help me change. Basically, I needed them with me to be the constant reassuring presence they’d always been, only more so. I couldn’t walk by myself, and every time I tried I had to keep asking myself if this was really happening to me, if I was really in this much pain. I’d never known pain like this, never even considered it, and I couldn’t really understand it or recognize it. Does that make any sense? No, I guess it doesn’t, but I kept having these little conversations with myself, trying to process what was happening to me. There’d be this voice inside my head saying, “Is this really happening?”
Saying, “There’s no way I’m in this much pain right now.”
Saying, “Can I really not walk by myself?”
In a lot of ways, it’s like I was having this out-of-body experience, because I could see myself struggling, I could see my parents helping me in the shower, figuring out how to get me comfortable in bed. I could see my pain in their faces, if that makes sense. It’s like I was watching a movie, but then I’d catch myself and check myself and realize it wasn’t a movie; it was real. This was me, suffering. These were my parents, absolutely beside themselves with worry, and their own suffering, too.
My mom has this thing, when she’s taking care of me—she switches into a state of triage, like she’s back at the hospital. She puts on her doctor face and becomes almost clinical. Whenever I got sick as a kid, or had my little scrapes or bruises, she’d take care of me almost like I was any other patient. But that was all out the window in Queensland. Here she was so broken up, because she knew what this could mean, in terms of my swimming and my goals and dreams. There was the pain itself, which was bad enough, and then there was what the pain could mean, so she was trying to keep it together, to not let me see how worried or upset she really was. But let’s just say she’s not much of an actress, my mother. I could see right through her.
By some other miracle, I was able to walk the next morning. A little bit. I was able to think. A little bit. The surreal parts of this ordeal were starting to fall away, and I let my mind turn back to swimming. For the first time, the idea of swimming seemed possible. During the worst of it, I don’t think I had a single swimming-related thought, other than the basic thought that I still wanted to compete in these championships. I tell that to people, and they think it’s a line, but it’s the God’s honest truth. Yeah, I wanted to jump right back in the pool and see what I could do, but I didn’t have a single thought about my future beyond that. There was no room in what was happening to think what it all might mean for our upcoming season at Cal, for worlds, for my career. No, it was just something to endure, to get past, and now that the very worst of it seemed to be behind me, my focus turned to the events on the next day’s schedule, when the competition was due to begin.
I hadn’t slept much that first night after my injury. I mostly lay in bed not moving, sandwiched between my mom and dad, trying to keep calm and focus on what lay in front of me. My parents kept checking on me, and whispering and tiptoeing so I wouldn’t know they kept checking on me, but I knew. I was just too tired and too beaten down to say anything, so I mostly kept my eyes closed and tried to will away the pain. As I lay there, I kept hearing Teri’s voice telling me to take it one moment at a time, and as soon as the sun came up and my parents started stirring I thought I’d try to get out of bed and see if I could walk. So I did—and, lo and behold, I could move about the room without any help. I thought, So far, so good. Then I thought I’d try to bend, and, lo and behold, it was impossible. Whatever metal rod Beth had felt when she was working on me in that back room off the pool was still there, in full force. So I thought, Okay, so bending is out. I ran through this whole checklist, did a whole inventory of what I could do and what I couldn’t do, and at the other end of it I thought it made sense to get back in the water.
This was my solution, the answer to all my problems. I could barely move, so I might as well swim. Genius, huh? But this was me, relentless, refusing to quit, even though my body was telling me to shut it down for the next while.
My poor mother thought I was nuts, but I wanted to see how this injury had left me, so Teri arranged for me to go to a private pool away from the craziness of the meet, away from the media. There was no one else there. Just me and Teri and one of the trainers. I only swam 1,000 meters, I didn’t want to push it, but at least I was swimming. Really, I was moving about okay. Tentatively, but okay. I couldn’t do any flip turns, and I certainly couldn’t do any starts, so I had to do a barrel turn each time I hit the wall. There was no way I was getting into that tuck position. And it hurt. Like I said, I was okay, or at least, way closer to okay than I’d had any right to imagine the day before. But every stroke was painful. Actually, every stroke was doubly painful, because here again, there was the pain itself, and the accompanying worry about what that pain might mean. I repeat myself, I know, but those two things, bundled together, were pressing down on me like you wouldn’t believe.
I wanted to know what was wrong with me. But at the same time, I didn’t want to know.
People asked me later if I was worried that I might have done further damage to whatever was going on with my back by swimming so soon after I went into spasm, but I honestly didn’t care. I got it in my head that this meet was all-important. I wasn’t ready to give up on worlds. And I wasn’t ready for my teammates to give up on me. That’s the thing with me and the team aspect of swimming. I’d been looking forward to swimming in the relays, and I knew my team needed me. We needed each other, really. Of course, they needed me at full strength, and who even knew if I’d be able to help them at all in my present condition? But I had myself convinced that I owed it to the other girls to push myself, to see what I had. Honestly, if you’d asked me at the time if I would have risked more serious injury by swimming, I wouldn’t have cared—that’s how important it was to me to swim in this meet, to do my part. It wasn’t smart, but this was how I was wired. This was me, wanting nothing more than to pick up my team and represent my country in the best way I knew how.
When I got out of the pool, I told Teri I wanted to swim my events the next day. She of course mentioned that the doctors still hadn’t figured out what was going on with me, and that the smart thing would be to sit this one out, but I wasn’t hearing any of that.
She said, “Are you sure, Miss? This is serious.”
I said, “Yes, I’m sure. And I’m completely serious.”
She said, “You have my full support either way. If you don’t swim at all, I’ll be behind you. If you swim every event, I’ll be behind you.”
I had no idea if I could even swim
well enough to qualify for worlds or to help my team. Only that I had to try.
The way the Pan Pacs work is that Team USA can qualify only two American swimmers into an A final. Even if you post one of the top eight times in the preliminary heats, you’ve still got to be one of the top two Americans to make it to the finals, so that’s what makes Pan Pacs one of the toughest meets on the schedule, but also one of the most exciting. And then, just to play it all out, you need to post one of the top two American times in order to qualify for worlds, which are held every two years.
Team USA has so many strong, talented swimmers, the very best in the world in a lot of events, that the Pan Pac mornings become a kind of intramural competition. We’re going up against each other in those preliminary heats, trying to get into that A final, so I had all that going on as I was getting ready to push past the pain and try to swim. Because, of course, it wasn’t enough just to swim. I had to be competitive. There had to be something on the line, and there was absolutely everything on the line, for everyone in the pool.
Was I at full strength? No. Was I pain-free? No. Would I be any better or stronger with one more day of rest, before my first morning swim in the 200-meter freestyle? Maybe. But one thing I knew for sure: I was able to suck it up and swim. Whatever pain I was feeling, it wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t tolerate it for the time it takes to swim a 200-meter race. I’d worked too hard, traveled too far, to let a back spasm keep me from competing all-out.
Let me tell you, getting up on those blocks for my 200-meter free and preparing to dive and knowing I would be in an incredible amount of pain for what I prayed to God would be under two minutes . . . oh man, it was the worst feeling imaginable. And yet it wasn’t something I couldn’t power past. I wasn’t even concerned about going a best time. Just making it through the race would have been victory enough.
Relentless Spirit Page 19
