Getting back in the game: Part II

The old saying "you don't know what you got until it's gone" became a reality for multiple Bigfork High School athletes this fall season as they incurred serious injuries that kept them from playing some of their favorite sports.

Many student athletes become injured at some point during a season, especially those who push themselves the hardest. However, this year some of those injuries meant time spent in a hospital for Bigfork's student athletes, and a few even required surgery. Although they are young enough to still be quick healers, they have all had to struggle with missing playing time and the idea that they may not even recover in time for the start of the basketball season. They are all nearly back to their old selves, but they have all learned some valuable lessons from the incidents.

The Bigfork Eagle is following their roads to recovery as they work their way through their injuries and onto the basketball court.

This week, read about Miranda Miller who is still completing her physical therapy in the hopes of being cleared to play basketball this season.

Miranda Miller didn't make it past the seventh minute of the Bigfork High School girls soccer team's first game before her season came to a sudden end.

In the Vals' season opener at home against Columbia Falls, teammate Caitlin Charlebois took a direct kick and it bounced off of the Wildkats' goalkeeper's hands and went right to Miller. As she prepared to kick the ball, Miller and the keeper collided and went up in the air. Miller was on the bottom of the jumble and the keeper fell right onto her right leg, which was at a slant.

"My leg went numb from the top of my leg down," Miller said. "I was rolling around and screaming."

A couple of her teammates, Kaitlyn Shults and Lena Olson, went to Miller's side to check on her and immediately saw the severity of the injury. They signaled for the coaches after telling Miller that it was best she didn't look at her leg.

That was probably a good idea since her tibia was snapped in half and had torn through all the muscles in her lower leg. The bones snapped down in the shape of a V pointing at the back of her calf.

"The doctors said if she would've laid on it any longer then the bone would've gone through the skin," Miller said.

Valkyries head coach Hauna Trenerry and assistant coach Charlie Appleby, as well as other local coaches and trainers tended to Miller while an ambulance was called to the scene.

"I could feel excruciating pain, but it was all tingly and numb like when your foot falls asleep," Miller said. "I could feel weird spasms in my leg too."

In between screams of pain and begging everyone to stop touching her leg, Miller said that she turned to coach Trenerry and said, "I want to play."

"She said, 'It's OK. You will eventually,'" Miller recounted.

Little did she know at that point that eventually would have to mean next season.

"If I could've rewound time to that game, I would've done the exact same thing," Miller said. "I wouldn't have changed anything because that's just the way I play."

When the ambulance arrived it parked on the field, and after they put an IV into Miller they loaded her into the vehicle and headed for Kalispell Regional Medical Center. They had to drive exceptionally slow though because she could feel every bump they hit along the highway.

When they arrived at the hospital Miller finally got to see the damaged state of her leg, but by that time it was so swollen she couldn't see much. She was given some pain medicine and quickly went to sleep as they prepared her for the two-and-a-half-hour surgery that followed.

During the surgery, doctors drilled a hole in Miller's tibia and hammered a titanium rod into her leg that is 1 inch in diameter and 18 inches long and they installed two screws into her leg as well.

All the hardware is permanent and for the rest of her life Miller will have to carry a card explaining the implants for when she goes through a metal detector.

Miller spent three days in the hospital, but the day after the accident she was already up on her crutches doing exercises to help speed her recovery.

"The doctor said that the surgery went well, but that I was done for the soccer season," Miller said. "He said I might be able to play basketball, but it would depend on how well I healed and what the physical therapist said. "He wasn't sure if I'd be able to play spring soccer either, but he said I'd definitely be able to play soccer next fall."

Along with the unfortunate news, the doctor also gave Miller a boot style leg brace, but no cast, and sent her home for bed rest until school started two weeks later.

"They wouldn't let me move," Miller said. "It was hard to depend on everyone else to do everything for me. I'm a really independent person. It was really tough because I couldn't do anything by myself."

Miller's leg soon started to show signs of atrophy from not using it.

"You can still tell that they are different sizes," Miller said. "It was really bad until I started doing physical therapy. Since then the muscle has started coming back, but really slowly."

Two-and-a-half weeks after the surgery, she began physical therapy for the injury, though she had already been working with Mike Close at Bigfork Physical Therapy prior to breaking her leg because both of her knees were hyper-extended.

When she was released from the hospital, Miller was told to keep bending her knee to make sure she didn't lose her range of motion. However, at her first visit she was only able to bend it 85 degrees.

"Mike was pretty mad at me and disappointed that I hadn't been bending it like they told me to, but it hurt really bad," Miller said. "He told me that if I wanted full performance in my running then I'd have to get it back to being hyper-extended and into the negative degrees. Otherwise that leg wouldn't match the other one and it would feel awkward and make me run weird."

Miller began attending physical therapy twice a week before school where she would do leg lifts, leg presses, point and flex her foot, and roll her ankle. As her leg got stronger, she also started using the rowing machine, doing squats and lunges, marching, using the treadmill and lifting weights with her legs.

"Mike told me that if I didn't do the exercises and just blew them off like I've done with other injuries then the damage would be permanent and I wouldn't ever be able to use my leg normally and I wouldn't be able to play sports," Miller said. "If I don't build it up now, it will never fully recover."

While Miller was focusing on rehab, her soccer team was going on with their season. Missing out on that was hard for Miller, who has played the sport since she was 3 years old. She is not only a member of the Vals soccer team, but she also plays select soccer in the spring.

"It was hard watching my team play and not have enough players to have subs," Miller said. "It was hard to see them lose a lot of games and not be able to help them."

However, this isn't the first time Miller was sidelined by an injury. Her knee problems started in the seventh grade when she got tendonitis from running track. She furthered the problem when she fell running the hurdles and strained her ACL in her right leg. She was also playing soccer at the time which worsened the injury. Her knees got better once she started physical therapy, but another injury in an eighth grade basketball game caused a LCL strain in her left knee.

Miller admits that she hasn't been the most diligent physical therapy patient in the past, but this time the stakes are much higher and she is trying to put more effort into her recovery.

"I love soccer and I don't ever want to not be able to play again," Miller said. "So when they told me that that could happen a light flashed in my head and I realized I better do what Mike says this time."

However, Miller said that she will be going against the advice of her physical therapist this basketball season, as she joins the team, though he feels she needs more recovery time.

"He always disagrees with what I say so I always have to prove him wrong," Miller said. "I started walking before he thought I would. I proved him wrong there. He says he doesn't think I'll be able to play basketball and I want to prove him wrong with that now."

For Miller, the idea of being on the bench for another season of a sport she loves to play is too much disappointment for one year.

"I don't want to go from having to not play soccer to not being able to play basketball too," Miller said. "I don't want to have to just sit and watch again. That would be really hard. I just want to play. I'm tired of not being able to run. I'm tired of sitting and watching."

Miller has participated in a few light practices since the start of the girls basketball season, but she will not find out if she is fully cleared to play until the end of this week.

"If I don't get to play, it will make me work harder and push myself harder next year," Miller said. "It will also make me be more careful when I am playing and if I get minor injuries I'll take better care of them than I have in the past so they heal better."

Miller said that the determining factor for whether she will be cleared to play is if her next X-ray shows that the bone is fully healed and it doesn't look as though a worse injury will happen if she has another accident.

"If I don't get cleared to play, it would be really disappointing, but I'm happy that I still have that hope of getting to play later in the season even if I can't right away," Miller said. "I'm going to be the manager if I don't play so I still get to be part of the team."

In the meantime, Miller is focusing on the lessons that the injury has taught her.

"It has made me realize that what you have and the opportunities you are given are privileges and they can be taken away," Miller said. "This injury took away my privilege to play sports. So now I know that I have to work hard to heal myself and take care of my body. I can't just lie to myself and hope it will be OK because it won't."