Solo, Hope Solo [best non fiction books of all time .txt] 📗

The decision was made for me. I was having surgery.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Seattle’s Finest

When I could finally open my eyes, I tried to take inventory. I was alone—in a hospital bed, my right shoulder bandaged and immobile, my head hazy from a potent dose of painkillers.

Dr. Andrews came in to see me. “The surgery took a very long time,” he said. “It was extremely complicated.” He had expected a ninety-minute operation; it took three and a half hours. It took so long that the anesthesia started to wear off in the middle of the operation and I needed another dose. Dr. Andrews told me he’d found extensive damage: a 360-degree tear of my labrum—the cuff of cartilage around the shoulder—the same injury that had almost ended the career of New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees. My biceps tendon was detached from my shoulder, and the capsule—the ligaments that keep the joint in place—was severely torn. The articular cartilage on the bone was shot. Bone chunks were floating around.

Dr. Andrews repaired the labrum and used thirteen anchors—eleven took hold—to secure the shoulder. He micro-fractured the bone around the labrum in hopes of regenerating cartilage. He pulled up my biceps tendon from where it had curled down my arm and reattached it with another anchor.

I tried to absorb everything he was telling me through my drug-induced haze, but only one thing registered: my shoulder had been wrecked. And my return to soccer was in jeopardy.

Not long after Dr. Andrews left, the pain in my shoulder erupted, a sickening all-consuming kind of hurt. I needed more painkillers, but the IV pumping drugs directly into me wasn’t working. The nurses finally got it fixed, and it flooded my body with pain medication and relief, but I had a terrible allergic reaction to the drugs, and itched all night. The nurses dosed me with Benadryl to help with that, and finally, at around seven a.m.—more than twenty-four hours after my surgery—I started to drift asleep.

“Hello?”

I snapped awake. Two young men were in my room ready to take me down to rehab.

“Already?”

Yes, already. I was trying to condense a twelve-to-eighteen month rehab into six months. I had to get back for the World Cup. I had to start rehab immediately.

I was miserable, but there was nothing I could do. These two strangers helped me get dressed—there was no time for modesty. I felt like hiding so I asked them to put my sunglasses on my face. They did, then put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me down to the rehab clinic—every bump and turn on the journey causing me to grimace in pain. I imagine I made a pretty picture: all drugged up with stringy hair and sunglasses in the Andrews “locker room,” the place where some of the most famous athletes in U.S. sports history had worked through pain and injury: Michael Jordan, Drew Brees, Brett Favre. I tried to go to the bathroom by myself but couldn’t manage to even pull my hair back. I was still throwing up, and the therapists had to send the receptionist to help me get on and off the toilet. My humiliation was complete.

That first morning, the therapist took my arm out of the sling and had me straighten my arm. That’s all I had to do. I thought I was going to die. A Tampa Bay Rays pitcher who’d had shoulder surgery four months earlier was in the clinic working out; he looked at me with deep sympathy. “I don’t miss those days,” he said.

I never took off my sunglasses. I didn’t want anyone to see the tears in my eyes.

II.

I stayed in Alabama for several weeks, miserable and in incredible pain. I felt helpless, having to ask for assistance to eat, to get dressed, to wash my hair. Jesse stayed with me in Birmingham, taking care of me, for which I was grateful. Through e-mail, my goalkeeper coach, Paul, monitored every step of my recovery. He asked me to send him a record of every exercise I did in therapy, even if it was just five curls with the elastic armband. He wanted to be kept abreast of the entire process, step by step, so that—true to his nature—he could make an intricately detailed, focused plan for when I returned to the team.

After a couple of weeks I left Alabama; I went to Atlanta to pack up my belongings. The national team was training there, getting ready to head to Mexico for World Cup qualifying, but I couldn’t have inspired much confidence—I was a drugged-up mess.

I headed back to Seattle, where my mom stayed with me. She saw to my every need and ignored my nastiness—the drugs made me feel terrible, and my sense of helplessness was frustrating. I wasn’t pleasant to be around, but my mom stayed, driving me an hour each way to my physical therapy in Gig Harbor.

I tracked the qualifying games online. The first three games were lopsided victories over Haiti, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. But on November 5, our team lost to Mexico 2–1. It was our first-ever loss to Mexico, and it put our backs against the wall: we had to beat Costa Rica in a third-place match in Cancún and then play a home-and-home with Italy for the right to play in the World Cup.

One more loss and we probably wouldn’t be going to Germany. I was in shock, and I started to beat myself up, second-guessing my decision to have surgery. The team was tired from a grueling WPS schedule that didn’t provide time off before qualifying. We hadn’t been playing together, and part of our struggle was the new possession-oriented system that Pia had put in. And, of course I thought I could have made a difference. The team’s struggles only added to my misery. I could barely move my arm two inches to the side. I couldn’t raise it at all. It