Richard Wood has suffered more than his share of injuries in the last few games including having his nose broken in two games as well as collecting a massive lump on his cheek after he was elbowed in the face at Swindon.
He has accepted he will get injured for the sake of the team, but he gets little sympathy from his family when he returns home after a game.
In the past two and a half weeks Wood has gone home sporting two black eyes, had his nose broken in three places and had the huge lump on his cheek.
Wood has said he is happy to put his body on the line in order to help his club climb away from the wrong end of the League One table, but his wife and children are not so happy about it.
Wood told the Coventry Telegraph' s Alan Poole: "I’m probably too honest at times, sticking my head where I know I’m going to get hurt, but I still do it; anything to try to win the ball and help the team. If you’ve got a sore spot somewhere it always seems to happen that you get hit there again and at the moment everything seems to be smashing me in the face. It’s not ideal but you just get on with it.
"Touch wood I won’t get any more bangs but if I do, I do it’s one of those things and I won’t complain about it. I just hope that the next time I get hit on the nose they knock it back the other way so it straightens up!"
Wood will need an operation to straighten his nose but he has decided to wait until the end of the season before having surgery.
He continued: "I don’t want to do it now because it would mean me missing at least one game. I suppose I could wait until the end of my career, but I don’t fancy looking like this for the next ten years.
Wood said he is not the sort of player to roll about on the ground after an injury but he admitted he was alarmed after a heavy clash of heads in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy victory at York.
Wood said, "I’m not one to roll about on the floor, if I can get up I will and if I smash my nose or whatever I’ll just plug it up and get back on, but I had never felt like that before. This massive egg came up under my eye right away and I thought it was the bone coming up. The physio said ‘get back on, you’re fine’ but I was worried that if I went up for another header and got a knock on it I’d be out for a long time.
"At Arsenal I went straight into their medical room for an X-ray but at York they handed me a bag of ice. By half-time the swelling had come down a lot so I wished that I had stayed on but I was genuinely scared when it happened.
"At Swindon the gaffer wanted me to hurry up because we were under pressure at the time and he didn’t know if he needed to get somebody else on. But we just couldn’t stop my nose bleeding and the fourth official was saying you’ve got to wait."