Dislocation

Here's best wishes to the Hungarian weightlifter, Janos Baranyai, who dislocated his elbow during Olympic competition. Warning: the video is kind of gut-wrenching.


After watching the news this morning I've found myself subconsciously rubbing my own elbow all day. It's still scarred from when I inverted it in a monkey bar accident when I was 8. Lucky for me I had a great orthopedic surgeon. One of the news commentators here said that they didn't believe dislocations were that bad, but when you see how that Baranyai's legs twitch you know that his body's probably going into the initial stages of shock. And I can attest that, having dislocated my shoulder as well (it was a hardcore badminton injury), elbow injuries hurt waaaayyy worse. As my orthopedic surgeon #2 said, your shoulder joint is really just a beach ball in an ashtray (with tendons and connective tissue). Your elbow, on the other hand, is a little more connected bone-wise.

The newscaster apologized after several people apparently called the station and mentioned the pain differential between different joints.

I just hope he recovers ok. It took me many moons to get the cast off my arm and get it back to full strength, and the damn thing still clicks when I try to lift weights. But I also wasn't an Olympic-class athlete, and I have a feeling that an injury like that could impair a professional weight-lifting career (though a couple articles I've read suggest that it's actually a fairly common injury for weightlifters).

Sidenote: Check out my buddy Nicole's blog on the very different Olympic experience that Nicaragua has. She points out (rightly so) that my perspective is from a small developed country.