Heavy Metal Hookers Are Used to Injuries as a Roller Derby Team

The life of a roller derby chick can be fraught with injuries. It comes with the territory, so Robin Drugstores, of the Heavy Metal Hookers of the Philly Roller Girl League, accepts her lot in life. She told Noisecreep about the inventory of injuries she has seen while skating for Satan, which is her team's motto!

"I've been fortunate to not have been injured," Drugstores said. "But I've seen broken ankles happen during practice. I saw someone smash their head into the side of the rink and have to go to hospital. I've seen broken hands and other little breaks. Luckily, it's been nothing horrific. The thing that happens to me all the time is that I fall and get a case of rink rash, since I don't wear tights." Rink rash is the term given to the red burn that inflicts a skater's skin after she falls on the rink's hard surface!

"My injuries are non-derby-related," Drugstores also said, chalking it up to luck and/or good genetics. "I was out skating with friends, and we were racing and since I have been so conditioned to fall a certain way, I immediately reacted around a turn, and thought, 'Oh, I'll go down on my knee,' since I was not thinking that I wasn't wearing knee pads like I usually do. That hurt and kept me off skates for a good month!"

Drugstores' advice to young ladies interested in getting involved in the world of derby is that "it is a super physical sport. It's not your mother's roller derby or even the roller derby of my youth, when it was very scripted and fake -- like professional wrestling. We have gone beyond that. We've legitimized it as a sport. It is 100 percent real, and it's 100 percent physical. The bout of roller derby is a full-contact sport. We all run the league, too. It is a do-it-yourself world and requires an intense amount of dedication and time."