I don’t live in Beaver.
I suffered a shoulder impingement and severe elbow inflammation during my last year of American Legion baseball (which was actually the year after I graduated HS, but I was still allowed to play because my birthday is after the August 1 cutoff date). Was supposed to have physical therapy for two months, but at the end of the first month, they decided I was healing ahead of schedule and discharged me. What they really meant was they were discharging me because my insurance was only covering the first month. I was fine for a while, but after a couple months my shoulder began to hurt like hell. I was no longer insured, so I just dealt with it. I’m insured now and have been for quite some time, but I still haven’t gotten it checked out (my elbow also flares up once in a while). I’m pretty sure my rotator cuff is damaged and the labrum could be as well, but I’ve built up such a tolerance to the pain over the years that I’ve convinced myself I can deal with it instead of going through any lengthy rehab.
Once in high school, I was hitting against a pitcher who was throwing over 90 MPH. I fouled a pitch off my shin and it left a small indentation, though I was otherwise uninjured. It doesn’t hurt at all, but that indentation is still there going on 17 years later.
Sort of. I was a tiny weenie kid, and there were things they wanted me to do in gym class that I simply could not do without hurting myself. No one ever listened to me when I told them that. They had an annual event called the “Turkey Trot”, right before we were released into the wild for Thanksgiving. (This was in Arizona, where it makes sense to do all your horrendous outdoor torture in November. They weren’t trying to freeze us to death, I swear.) The idea was to get everyone to run a mile – even me, the short skinny 9-year-old who loathed sports, recess, and being outside in general.
I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I did something to my foot. I don’t know if it was a dislocation or a tear or a stress fracture or what. The adults rolled their eyes when I complained that it hurt and told me to keep going, so I limped along as best I could until I was allowed to sit down and cry. Every so often, I stay on my feet too long in the wrong shoes, and I end up lollomphing around for a week trying to keep my weight off it while whatever has reoccurred takes its sweet time un-occurring again.
I continued to be the weenie kid all through HS, so I don’t have any more exciting stories to tell. 
Not really a high school thing, but I have several injuries that I got in Navy boot camp that still bother me. I have flat feet, which didn’t help, but I’ve got tendinitis in one Achilles heel, a bad knee, and arthritis in my ankles from sprains related to uniform shoes. (Being female, I had to wear high heels and being a klutz, I can’t walk in them. I don’t have to wear them now, so I don’t, but back then I had to so I did.) When it’s cold or I’ve been on my feet all day, I feel all of it.
You had me right there. Shoulder impingement is shockingly painful. I’m so sorry. ![]()
My HS injury described upthread basically makes me very prone to impingement in that shoulder. I didn’t bother naming it because I didn’t know how well-known the term was. (I had never heard of it until it was diagnosed three years ago.)
I’m 42, and I definitely feel the injuries I had.
My torn up knees don’t really bug me, which is a little perplexing. I tore my ACL partially and my MCL completely playing football in 1989, with surgical reconstruction of the MCL, and I tore my patellar tendon completely last year (Jan 2014), and neither of those pains me at all.
What perplexes me is that things I never expected are what bug me nowadays, like a sprained wrist from a particularly ungainly move in a college game of Twister, or the seemingly arthritic shoulder aches and pains that I’m guessing are due to decades of weightlifting as a teenager and young man. Or the foot pain from some sort of soft tissue injury to my foot during a PE class in college.
It’s all the little one-off, not that serious injuries that seem to bug me the most, not the serious ones. I suspect it’s because the football-related stuff (knee, one ankle sprain) was promptly and apparently expertly treated by our trainers, the team doctor, and shortly afterward, orthopedic surgeons. The rinky-dink stuff I just let heal on their own, and they’re the ones that bug me now.
JV football in 9th grade gave me a left shoulder injury that causes problems to this day. I have to be very careful about raising my left arm over my head because if I’m not, it can pop out of socket and that shit hurts!
You may want to see an orthopedic surgeon and physical therapist about that. My dad dislocated his shoulder during basic training in the AF, and had his shoulder do that for years- from 1968 (when he started) up through probably the early 1990s, when he finally went to the Dr. and they prescribed him some physical therapy exercises.
AFAIK, his shoulder hasn’t gone out of joint since.