Manu Ginobili addresses his injury situation (translated)

This is the translation of an article Manu posted on the Spanish section of his site manuginobili.com on January 5.

The post's writing style seems to match others that he's put up, which leads me to believe it was actually him that posted it. The translation is after the jump.

It's a total bummer

This is a total bummer. I know worse things can happen and I don't mean to come off as whiny, but after waiting for so long for the NBA to come back, then having such a great start of the season and being so happy to just be out there playing, this happens.

It happened in the kind of play that takes place ten times a game. I reached in to try to steal the ball and my hand was "slashed open" around my left pinky finger. I think the actual collision was with the ball, but I'm not sure since I haven't watched the replay. As soon as it started to hurt, I touched it and noticed that something was wrong. I was pretty scared at first since I could see blood, so I kept trying to feel if a broken bone had punctured through, but that wasn't it. The web on my finger had been lacerated so I got six stitches and I'm going to have surgery today, here in San Antonio.

The studies showed that I've sustained a pretty severe spiral fracture. I was tended to by hand specialists and they put a splint on my finger to immobilize it. I looked for a second opinion, but the general consensus was that I should have surgery. The finger is twisted inwards so a plaque and two pins are necessary to make sure that the bone heals in the right position.

This is going to be just the second time for me in the OR. The first one came after the Beijing Olympics, when I had my ankle "cleaned up". In theory, having the surgery could help shave two weeks off the recovery process, but it will all depend on how the bone heals. The recovery time is anywhere between 5 to 8 weeks.

After finding out what the injury actually was, I tried to find out if it had happened to anyone else and it turns out it's pretty common in basketball. Luis Scola suffered the same injury in 2005, Pablo Prigioni had it last year and I read that Carlos Boozer also suffered a similar injury. Some more serious, some less, but all were similar.

It all happened very recently, so I probably won't be joining the team on the next road trip (we play at Oklahoma on Sunday and at Milwaukee on Tuesday ), but after that I'll be joining them on the road, cheering from the bench.

While I'm recovering, James Anderson and Gary Neal, who is coming back from the appendectomy he had at the beginning of the season, we'll fill in for me.

As for the team, we are playing inconsistently. We had three great wins at home and two really bad losses on the road. I don't know if home court advantage is the real difference or not, but it's evident that we have a long way to go. The schedule is packed, though that's true for every team, so we'll just have to continue to improve on the fly.

It's going to be a tough season and we shouldn't jump to conclusions this early, but we really need playing time to improve, both as individuals and as a team . I have no choice but to wait for the hand to heal and do what I have to do to get better. I am a little annoyed by the fact that I will have to start from scratch like it was preseason for the third time now, after doing it with the national team and then with the Spurs. I want to thank everyone for the kind words I've received after the injury, both publicly and privately. And like I always say, I know worse things can happen and this is just part of life for us athletes. I just have to push forward.

MANU

[Editor's Note: Thanks to Edg5 for doing the translation. I had a lot of questions about Manu's injury when I heard about it, and so I did some reading tonight to find out just what's going on with him. If you're curious too, then here's some interesting reading material to educate yourself about all of the terms involved with Manu's injury.

Since I wondered about what it was that set apart a spiral fracture from other kinds, I've included this excellent graphical comparison of the different kinds of fractures. If you can tolerate a pretty techinal approach, this discussion of spiral metacarpal fractures deserves at least a skim because of the fascinating details it includes. Also, there just happens to be a name for a break of the fifth metacarpal, it's called a boxer's fracture and is described here - it takes a rather facile approach, but is also pretty unintentionally hilarious too (I loved their advice on how to avoid such a break.)

I found it pretty hard to find any information about lacerations of the web between the fingers, so if anyone has knowledge or a link about that, please include it in the comments and I'll add it here. - J.R. Wilco]