“Time for dinner, Henry!” my mom called up to me.
“Just a minute! Let me finish this etude first!” I called back down.
I picked up my violin, placing the shoulder rest on my shoulder and resting my chin on top, and started up again where I had left off in the piece, my fingers flying across the fingerboard and my bow gliding across the strings. I ended the song and then sighed, starting to pack the violin back into its case. As I did, I noticed a sharp pain in my fingers that had never been there before. I ignored it and continued to put away the violin. After it had finally been packed away into the case I went downstairs. My mom, dad, and sister were already sitting down at the table, eating a pizza that my mom had probably ordered from some restaurant with one of those coupons that we get in the mail sometimes.
As I sat down my dad asked me how school went.
“Okay, I guess” I replied, “We won the tennis match against Western High.”
“Why that’s wonderful!” exclaimed my mother. I simply shrugged.
“Wanna help me with math homework after dinner?” my sister asked
“Or are you just going to go practice more violin,” she added sadly looking down into her lap.
“Probably,” I responded thinking that I might as well get in some more practice before the next competition.
“Sigh… It seems like you’re always either practicing tennis or violin. Don’t you ever want to do anything else?” my sister said to me.
“I don’t know. But can’t dad help you with your homework? Does it really matter who helps you?” I replied to her.
“I guess not…” she simpered back at me.
I suppose that I should help her with her homework sometimes, after all I am her brother. But I needed to practice for competitions that I had coming up. There was the school’s Solo Festival, the MCYO solo contest, and possibly the Young String Players Awards Festival. There were also the various tennis matches that my school team would have to play over the course of the season against the other high schools in the county.
As I was practicing later that night, I once again noticed the pain. I winced and kept on drilling the notes of the song; a Mozart concerto that was supposedly to be one of his best, into my head. It was a hard piece, which is probably why I was playing it; harder pieces get better scores in competitions. But even as I was thinking about this I couldn’t ignore the pain building up in my hand. It was still there as I went to sleep.
The next day at school, my hand hurt whenever I wrote anything. At tennis practice after school, my arm started to hurt as well. A jarring sensation would go up my arm every time I swung my gray racket at those small yellow tennis balls. The pain was an inconvenience that prevented me from playing well; something had to be done about it.
When I told my mom about the pain, she told me to take a rest from practicing. She also scheduled a doctor’s appointment for me. Since I couldn’t practice, there wasn’t much to do. For the first time in a while I was bored. My sister was busy practicing the flute. She wasn’t that good at it. She never took any lessons, yet she still played it for a while every day. It was one of those mysteries of life that I would probably never understand. I didn’t want to do homework either since nothing at school interested me anymore. In the future I would probably become a professional tennis player; I was already one of the best in the school. Or maybe I would get a job as a violinist in a philharmonic somewhere. That was certainly a more stable and steady source of income.
My mom picked me up at school the next day to go to the doctor’s office. I walked into the empty waiting room and signed in. The attendant told me that I could go in immediately.
The doctor, an old, slightly overweight, balding man walked in and started doing all the things doctors do at a check-up. He took my pulse, looked in my eyes, and finally asked me to tell him about my arm. I told him about how it had been paining me, so he poked and prodded it, and even took me into another room to take an x-ray.

After all of that was done, he told me to wait in the room until everything was processed. He came back in about 15 minutes later, a grim expression on his face.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he said to me. Well I had already deduced that much, but what he said next surprised me a lot. He told me that I shouldn’t overexert myself playing tennis or violin for a while, or there could be serious consequences. Apparently there was damage to all the tendons and ligaments in my arm, and that they needed time to heal. He even gave me a special arm brace to wear while I slept to speed up the recovery.

When I got home I sat there and pondered this. I would be put behind on all the competitions and auditions that were coming up for violin. The tennis team at my school would also be put behind because I was the team captain and our star player. No, I had to keep on playing or else my future would be put at stake. I needed all the practice I could get in violin and tennis to be able to make money off of them after I graduated.

The next day, in complete disregard of the doctor’s orders, I went to tennis practice as usual. I hadn’t told anyone but my mother about the pain, and I told myself that the pain had gone down from before. But as I started hitting, the pain started up again. I winced every shot that I hit, and volleys were a brutal challenge to get through.

Practice dragged on, and I told myself that I was going to get through it fine, but in reality I was nowhere near fine. I felt lightheaded, and my arm felt like it was about to be ripped from its socket. Every swing was an effort. The ball seemed to be spinning in stranger circles now. The sun was beating down enormously hard on my face, my head started to pound, my racket was barely coming up to meet the ball now. It seemed to almost fall out of my hand every time I hit a ball, an enormous dead weight in my hands that I still had to carry on. Then on the final serve of the game, I felt like I was going to faint, but I told myself to go on, that I would be fine if I could just get this serve off. I tossed the ball into the air and lifted my racket back and started to swing, but suddenly there was this terrible pain in my arm. It seemed to burst out of nowhere and overwhelm me completely. Suddenly I was kneeling on the ground screaming out in pain. I remember snatches of what happened next. The coach running over to me, someone calling 911, my teammates gathering around me like I was some sort of fallen comrade, and finally, the paramedics in their white uniforms coming with a stretcher to take me to the hospital. I think that’s around when I blacked out.

When I woke up, I was in a hospital room, being attended to by a nurse who smiled and told me that a doctor would explain everything to me in a bit. I looked around, and then I noticed the large cast on my arm. After that, a doctor came in and told me that I had ripped several muscles in my arm. I would need to go to rehab, and I couldn’t use the arm for at least a year.

That news hit me like a freight train. An entire year of doing nothing, no practicing violin, no playing tennis, nothing that involved that arm. This seemed like the end to me. I would be even further behind than I would have if I had taken the first doctors advice.

I got home and shut the door to my room and sat there staring at my violin case sitting against the wall, with my tennis racket leaning against that same wall. It was no fair, I thought to myself, that other people would be able to do all these things that would enable them to get jobs in the future, but that I had lost my two best prospects for fame and wealth.

I brooded over these dark thoughts for the next few months, this negative energy inside me was reflected in everything I did. I stopped showing up to class a lot of the time, I would just sit on a park bench staring with contempt at the people playing tennis at the courts there. The absentee notices piled up, my parents tried talking to me about it, but I didn’t want to hear anything they had to say to me. I couldn’t stand the sight of watching our school orchestra perform. All of those people who weren’t even close to my level of play, were playing! And all the while I was stuck with a cast on my arm, and no way of touching a violin. How could I ever regain my credentials in the violin community if I didn’t play for a year?! And similarly, how could I ever lead my team to the state championships, and get that trophy, that big golden trophy that personified all of my skill and proficiency at the game, if I didn’t serve a tennis ball for a year?! With these thoughts swirling around in my head, I became increasingly reclusive, taking my meals alone in my room, and not talking to anyone about anything.

This went on for a while, but one day something happened that changed my life forever. I was walking down the hallway when I heard my sister playing her flute. I saw her through the doorway, with her back turned to me and her head facing a sheet of music. And there seemed to be a certain indescribable happiness emanating from her. She wasn’t merely practicing the song, but playing it. My sister truly seemed into the music; she was one with it. She was actually enjoying playing the instrument, not because she was good at it but because she thought it was fun. I had never considered this in my life before; I thought the reason you do anything was to be the best, not to feel enjoyment from it. This put a thought into my head.
I went to my room, put a CD of the Mozart concerto into the stereo, and started listening. And it’s true; there was a certain beauty to it that I had never noticed before. I suddenly found myself waiting for the day when the cast would come off of my arm, although for a completely different reason than before…