Neither beginners nor pros are immune to the fickle will of the ocean. No matter how long you’ve been surfing, it eventually takes its toll. Comedian Amy Schumer was the latest to feel the wrath of the sea, after an old surfing injury sent her to the surgeon’s table.
“Since my surfing injury back in the day my L5 has been killing me,” wrote Schumer on Instagram, accompanied by a photo of her recovering at home and sporting a walker. “Today I got a laminectomy! It’s a short recovery and when I’m feeling better I will buy a bra!”
According to the Mayo Clinic, a laminectomy is a surgery in which the back arch of a spinal bone, called the lamina, is removed. This is done in order to enlarge the spinal canal and ease pressure on the spinal cord or nerves. In Schumer’s case, this was done on the L5 vertebra, located in the lower back.
The unspecified surfing injury is not the only time Schumer’s back has taken a sports-related beating. Just a week earlier, she had described being thrown off a horse while riding with her son. “I had been riding for about one minute when an automated sprinkler came on hitting my horse in the face,” she wrote. “He threw me off. I’ve never fallen off a horse before. I hit the ground hard.”
However, in order to prove to her son and the other children in attendance that everything was alright, she had to literally get back on the horse. “I took a deep breath and got my 44-year-old, bad-backed ass right back up on that horse and rode and trotted and it sent a message to those kids and myself,” she wrote.
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