i love rugby. i used to play on a fairly low level, but when i injured my acromioclavicular joint i knew i needed to stop. it was fun but i was not willing to put my body on the line any more. it seemed too dangerous for me. recently i have reviewed this decision.the first patient i touched on in a previous post. during a game of soccer the goal post fell on him and split his pancreas in two. the tail then slowly shrivelled up into a hard fibrotic mass. the story came to a happy ending when i removed that distal portion of the pancreas. by that time it was embedded in scar tissue and it was quite something to peel it off the renal vein behind it and the splenic vein above it. somehow everything went well. i was just left with a sense of how dangerous soccer can be.
the next patient was playing a game of snooker. i can only assume he was winning and by quite some margin because his opponent seemed to get annoyed at a stage during the game. i know this because he suddenly shot my patient. and he didn't shoot him once or twice. for good measure he put four bullets through him. he must have had an unassailable lead in their friendly game of snooker. unassailable by the standard rules anyway.
so, recently having treated two casualties of the blood sports of soccer and snooker, i realise rugby was really not that dangerous at all.
