Queen City Roller Girls' travel team, the Lake Effect Furies, handily defeated the Gotham Girls' B-team, the Wall Street Traitors, in a 40-minute expo bout tonight. It was pretty awesome to watch (I watched it via live streaming video on derbynewsnetwork.com, but should you be interested, the footage is available there archived), especially because it was our intro to the Derby News Network crowd.

I am very, very sad we couldn't go, though. Z was going to go as the mascot, and he would've had a great time-- Gotham has Jeerleaders, and the headlining bout of the night was Charm City Roller Girls, out of Baltimore-- they wear yellow jerseys and have a mascot, a guy in a banana suit called Bane-Ana, who got up to some ridiculously amusing shenanigans with the Jeerleaders.
The Lake Effect Furry would've had a blast with them.

You might be a derby girl when: a medical professional says to you, "You might wanna lay off the roller derby until we see how the [course of treatment] goes," and you say, "Hm, well, what conditions do I have to meet in order to not have to make with the laying off?" and he looks at you like you have four heads. Straightjacket, here I come!!!

More seriously, I skated last night and it hurt (skating doesn't hurt, but we scrimmaged, and I gave an assist using my arm, which was OK, but then I had some chick fall sprawling in front of me and I had nowhere to go but to land on her head, which is great, except I hit my arm on the landing, and oh! my! not so great! wow!). So today I called the sports medicine group, and they said Come right in tonight we have a 6pm appointment. Oh! Uh, OK! I said, and did so.
I spent like 20 minutes filling out paperwork (I! have health insurance! that covers this! weeee! This is so great!); before I was even done some nice young lady came and took me to X-ray me from many angles, and then I went right in to see one Dr. Darling, who was indeed darling, and much younger than you'd think. He was charmingly friendly, and thumped on me in lots of ways. "Does that hurt?" "No." "How about this?" "Nn, well, ok." "How about th--" "AUGH."
After much prodding and testing and poking, he determined that I most likely had a shoulder subluxation last Saturday. What that means is that it's a partial dislocation; the head of the humerus doesn't slide all the way out of the socket of the shoulder, but it does partially.
He seemed relatively unfazed by my demonstration that that's part of my normal range of motion for my shoulder-- which is what perplexes me about the injury. I can "pop" my shoulder out easily, and often do-- when opening a door I sometimes let it slide out, because it kinda slingshots back in. It just, I dunno, goes that way, in order to complete the motion of the joint. I pop the joint out to get at my bra strap because I can't reach otherwise. The problem on Saturday was that it was "out", and i put pressure on the elbow at an angle, so it was pulled out of its normal range of motion. So it hurts now because I can't let it pop out to do what I normally do, because all the bits that hold it in are so sore from getting pushed on way too hard.

Anyway, Dr. Darling informed me that I did not in fact tear any rotator cuff anything, and indeed my rotator cuffs are rockin'. (I forget his actual word, but he seemed impressed at how well-developed the muscles were.) But he is worried that the shoulder could sublux again, and even fully dislocate, and that could result in a labral tear. So he's worried for my labrum. I had to Google that.
Ohhhhh.
Hey neat!
So I spent like two hours tonight reading about shoulder anatomy. (And I'm not a freak-- it's right in Grey's Anatomy that the shoulder capsule is loose enough to allow the bones to go up to 2.5cm out of contact-- so I'm perfectly normal in being able to pop my shoulders out.)

He said, however, I "might wanna lay off the roller derby" until we'd had a chance to try a course of physical therapy treatment. I looked at him, and he said, "No, huh?"
"It's the end of the season," I said. "Championships are coming up. I have a scrimmage on Sunday. There's... I really can't not skate. Is there anything I can do to minimize the damage I do to myself in the meantime?"
He didn't take a lot of persuading. He's treated half my team. He knows how this is.
"We could get you a brace to limit motion of the joint," he said.

While he was off talking to the orthotics guy I texted my teammate Hyper Bean. We call her Robo-Bean. She missed half the season, two seasons ago, to rotator cuff surgery, and now wears a motion-restrictive brace that makes her look a bit like the Terminator. She texted me back, and gave me the "good" brand name and the "bad" one, as well as fitting advice. And she offered to bring both to practice tonight so I could see them. I know my injury is different from hers, but my body is a similar size to hers.

So I am waiting for a call from the orthotic guy, but in the meantime i have a The Sully, which is a neoprene hook-and-loop octopus of a torture device. I have tried it on and understand how it works and now know what to ask for and what to ask NOT for. Also these are not designed for humans with breasts. Which is, oddly enough, just about half the adult population, but you know, nobody seems to notice that. W-evs!

Easter is nice, but mostly it's nice because it's spring. I've also had a third of a bottle of champagne, a third of a bottle of mead, and rather a bit of Jack and Coke. So here we go.

1) Happy birthday (e:Jim). I get really confused now that Z works outside the house because his coworkers have the same names as mine. My boss, who I love, is also Jim, and I have a Bill, and a Mark at the other store who calls all the time, and so when (e:Zobar) tells me how frustrated he is with Bill or whatever I think about our ebay guy and wonder how anyone could ever get mad at him, even though I know, of course, he's talking about other-Bill, who I've even met. It's quite funny.

2) I am so glad I have health insurance, and I'm glad I don't need a referral to go to the physical therapist, because my shoulder is definitely not right. But now I need there to be an extra weekday when I'm not working-- the day in between Sunday and Monday that I've proposed on other occasions, which is tentatively scheduled to be Super Extra Casual Day at work (when you can wear basketball shorts and not wash your hair) but also the day you can take off without losing your 40-hour status, so that you can get shit done like go to the doctor and grocery-shop and go to the bank and go places that are only open during working hours.

3) My little sister had chickens mailed to her. Apparently this is standard practice. 25 hatchlings, egg-layers; 24 female and 1 male. This is their starter flock for their organic farm which they're for-real starting up now in Shelbyville, IL. Except the chickens were supposed to be mailed tomorrow, to arrive Tuesday, but her husband got a call from Springfield from a confused postal worker saying "Um, there's a peeping box with your name on it, and if we leave this thing overnight on the loading dock until we're open, that box ain't gonna be peeping no more-- you wanna come get it while they're still peeping?" So her husband had to drive an hour and a half each way to pick up these chicks, instead of going to Easter dinner. Ann is righteously pissed, because sure the hatchery would give her $ back if the chicks all arrived dead Monday after sitting out an extra day, but who is gonna give those baby chickens a refund on their 25 tiny lives? Not cool! Who mails live animals on a Saturday! Bonus points to the postal worker who spotted the box and took time to call them.

4) Roller derby. I'm in this highlight reel. But what's awesome is of course the soundtrack. See, my team rickrolled the entire venue, instead of having a normal intro song. It was totally fucking awesome. So they put that in the highlight reel. Put it on mute for the first 20 seconds if you gotta, but totally watch this, because my team (in blue) is completely awesome.


4a) more roller derby: the Queen City Roller Girls (Buffalo league)'s Travel Team, the Lake Effect Furies, are coming to New York City April 10th, to play Gotham Girls' B-team (the Wall Street Traitors) as the opening bout for their season opener. It's almost sold out, the last 50 tickets will go onsale tonight at midnight. If you're down there, might be worth checking out. Wear blue and scream your head off for the Furies!! It's their debut bout under that name, I believe; last season they played as the QCRG Allstars.
Of course, everyone immediately began misspelling it as the "Furries", and so (e:zobar) wanted to be the mascot but that didn't go anywhere. Yet. We'll see.

OK that's it, I have to go drink more Jack.

Knockouts came from behind to tie last night's game in the final jam, forcing a sudden-death overtime last jam. Unfortunately for us, our jammer was sent to the penalty box, so the unopposed other jammer was free to score points: she was held to a single scoring pass, but that's all they needed, so we lost by four points or so. It was very exciting.

I am hurting in a lot of places, but mostly my shoulder, which I think I partially dislocated at one point. I pulled muscles in my right thigh and left hip/butt, but those are minor. Currently more distressing is that I had trouble sleeping, what with the shoulder injury keeping me from lying normally, and so am operating on about 3 hours' sleep and have practice in 3 hours. I am going to go back to bed and see what happens. Wish me luck. (Dosing up on ibuprofen now.)