As he was struggling to get up from being tackled, adrenaline rushed through his body as he lied on the soccer field. Joel Joseph was confused. He didn’t realize his leg was broken until he grabbed his leg and saw it dangling. The adrenaline slowly fading away, the screaming started, and the pain he felt on the way to the hospital was unbearable.
Joseph, a junior, was tackled and injured on Aug. 28th. His injury, relatively clean cut, was a compound fracture, with his fibula broken in two places and his tibia broken in one. Because he’s an athlete, a starting forward in soccer and a member of the track team, this injury has been especially devastating for him.
“It was definitely a shock due to me having all that adrenaline. I didn’t notice it at first. I didn’t feel the pain until I started looking at my leg,” Joseph said. “It’s hard to describe it. I felt the break. It was sharp cause I felt it pushing against my skin, but it was a burning like a blunt sensation, as if something bulky was stabbing me. Like a bat was pushing against my skin at the same time. It was awful pain.”
After he arrived at the hospital, the first thing the doctors worked on was straightening his leg out. He had it bent because it was more comfortable. Then they put a stilt under his leg to keep it straight and heal better.
“They put a rod in my leg, I have an incision they put at the top of my knee where they had said they had to hammer the rod and there’s stitch tape, and there’s a screw on the side of my leg and two screws on my ankle where I have band aids covering them,” he said.
The doctors told him his healing time would be a minimum of six weeks, but said he should be able to get back to sports in January. They said the time to get off crutches depends on how long it takes him to relearn to walk.
“You wouldn’t expect a person who broke a leg especially as bad as this to like come back to a sport and then just be amazing, but I still think I can do really good,” Joseph said. “I’m still coming for that school record. This is my junior year. Even if I don’t make it this year, I’ve got next year, but I definitely think I should be pretty good. I hope to go to state this year, since I didn’t make it last year, and I was really close by a couple inches from making it. So I definitely think I can bounce back and do good this year.”
Scoring his first goal of the season earlier in the week against Andrean, Joseph was off to a great start this year. It was a huge loss for the team so early in the season.
“Finding out he would be out for the season, that was pretty devastating for us as a team,” Coach Past said. “Not only for what he would have provided statistically, but he’s just such a great teammate to all the players. Everybody really loves him.
“It’s definitely been difficult when I lose a player of Joel’s caliber, his incredible speed that he offers at that position and his skill level from last year to this year had really improved.”
The team checked up on Joseph to see how he’s doing as much as possible. The guys texted him through social media, and Coach Past texted him a few times a week. Now, that he’s back in school it’s been easier for everyone to check up on him, to see how his healing process is going and show they care.
While his team was there for him during this hard time, he said he also turned to his friends, family, and god when he was feeling depressed.
“Putting almost everything I had into sports, and then just for it to end at the beginning of the season, it really took me out, and then seeing the same scenery over and over again and then being lonely,” Joseph said. “It got to me mentally, and I didn’t really like it.”
