Dodge This!

Been off blogging lately because I've been too busy. Well, my readers have been too busy too, giving birth to babies and what not. But in the meantime, I've still been coming up with blog topics.

This past Wednesday, we had a company dodgeball tournament.

In Taiwan, dodgeball is a common game on schoolgrounds much like it was for me in Canada, but with a different set of rules.

The rules I knew as a kid were something like this:
- The game started with either a number of balls laying along a center line which both teams race to gather after a 1-2-3 Go! or with each team starting with the same number of balls
- If you get hit, you go into a zone behind your enemy's territory and can throw the ball from there
- If you catch a ball before it hits the ground, then one of your "dead" can come back in to play

The common rules in Taiwan are more like this:
- Each team starts with members in the "in play" area, and is surrounded on 3 sides by members of the opposite team
- There is only one ball in play
- If someone in the surrounding area knocks out a player, s/he can go into the "in play" area for his/her team
- Catching a ball doesn't result in your team member coming back from the dead

So, in the small area of a basketball half-court, we squeezed in two teams of 20, and whipped around a yoga exercise ball.

Made from thick rubber, a yoga ball is pretty heavy - and guarantees injury. I threw out a few people, but on one throw (which managed to kill an opponent) my arm came at a strange angle and resulted in a minor dislocation of my shoulder. Well, it was more of a subluxation - a partial dislocation. So now I have two bad shoulders, and I'm getting treatment from my physiotherapist now. Sigh.

But that injury was far from being the worst of the night. One coworker took the ball in the face, shattering his glasses. I wasn't playing in that game, so I didn't see the hit; but I saw that there was blood running down his face, with glass shards caught in and around his eye. So, he was taken to the hospital. Over the next couple of days, I heard he had surgery on his eye. Apparently the pressure from the hit might have busted up his eye a little, and now he can't work for a month, as they pay attention to the recovery to see if everything went smoothly.