I Think Something Happened to My Shoulder / Gabe, Artist

I was playing inner tube water polo at the Chinatown YMCA in 2011. I’m not an inner tube water polo player in general, but someone had convinced me to join this league. I got into my tube and it was much harder than I thought it was going to be. In general, people were very aggressive playing water polo. I was playing and I blocked somebody. I felt this sensation like a snap, it basically, happened in my shoulder. I went underwater and my arm was locked in place. It was locked like this up at a 90-degree angle, and I couldn’t lower it. I was underwater, and I was like, “This is weird. I’ve never had a sensation like this where I physically can’t move my body, but I could a second ago.”

I came out of the water with my arm up, and people were going, “What’s going on with this guy?” I went over to the lifeguard, and I was like, “Hey, I think something happened to my shoulder.” The lifeguard looked at me and turned green because my bone was pushing up out of the skin. It wasn’t out, but you could see the bone up like a little flap, or something. He was like, “You need to get out of the pool now.” So I got out of the pool, and suddenly I was in a ton of pain because my shoulder had dislocated. It popped out of the socket. I didn’t realize this at the time. I didn’t know that much about my anatomy, but this is the first thing that put me in contact with that because it was clear to me my shoulder is like a ball, and there’s this joint like a hook that goes around the ball, and it had just come out of that hook, and the ball was out. It wasn’t going back in on its own.

I was sitting there shirtless at the pool, and starting to be in a lot of pain. They called the ambulance, and they brought me to the ER. We drove up to Beth Israel Hospital. My friend, Summer, came with me. I was in the back of the ambulance screaming. It was a lot of pain. So we got there. Again, I wore a bathing suit in the ER. The doctor was like, “Okay, we got to get him inside.” So they put me in there, but they’ve got to X-ray you first while you have this. So they did an X-ray while the shoulder was still out. That was the most pain I’ve been in ever. They gave me some morphine and that didn’t do anything for it.

So then I’m sitting there and they’re telling me, “We have to put your shoulder back in place, but we can’t do it. We need to call someone who can do it who’s not here.” It’s 10 o’clock at night. My girlfriend came into the ER at that point, and she saw it. She started throwing up in the hospital because it was something about seeing the pain, and then me being in pain. She had this visceral reaction to it so she’s throwing up in the room. I’m still sitting there, and this doctor is like, “What am I going to do?” They eventually found this person who came in about an hour later.

I was dreading this, but it wasn’t so bad because the pain goes away immediately when your joint goes back into place. So they did a thing where they hold you down. They hold your shoulder down. They hold your chest down, and they just yank it back in place. They pull both parts of your body away from each other, and you feel the moment where it goes back in, which is this very strange feeling of it’s relief because everything is right again, but it’s also mechanical. There’s a visceral sound, or feeling to me about this event almost like a chalky feeling, of a chalk snapping. And then the minute it’s in the pain completely goes away. It’s swollen and you put ice on it, but that was the first time it’s happened. It’s happened about four times since then, so until you have surgery it keeps happening, but I don’t play inner tube water polo anymore.

I mean, it’s really understanding how your body is held in place by muscles and ligaments, and joints. I’ve heard about that, and I’ve studied some anatomy, but until you feel it happen you don’t really feel like your body is a mechanism in that way so much until you have something happen to you that requires surgery. It’s just like going to get your car fixed in a way, but it’s human bodies. I think doctors feel that way, too. They have these procedures they do over and over again, and people become like machines that they’re repairing. Now I feel like that, too, with the shoulder, but it always happens in an absurd way where I’m not wearing any clothes and then suddenly I have to be in the ER. It’s often happened to me in pools. I don’t know why. Maybe something about the water loosens up the joint, but it’s not fun when it happens.

It’s an awful feeling, and I don’t ever want to have it again. When it happens I’m like, “Oh no.” It happened to me once while walking on the subway steps. I slipped on some ice and it just went out. This woman next to me saw it happen, and she was like, “Oh, my God.” It looks gross. I was like, “Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.” I’m comforting her even though I’m there with my bone sticking out of my shoulder. I went to go put my jacket on because I was just so embarrassed at this point. It was at Union Square. When I put the jacket on it went back in place. She was like, “What?” She thought she was on a Candid Camera show or something, but she wanted to make sure I was okay which is so nice, but I was like, “It’s fine. This happens.” So people don’t know like I said before, it’s like people don’t know what people are living with their own bodies, and how tenuous they are, I guess.