Laid it Down

Had my second bicycling accident of the year tonight.  Neither of them has been too bad and neither involved cars or traffic, thankfully.  The first one happened about two months or so ago.  My brakes were getting looser and looser so I watched a YouTube video and tightened them up so that they had a two finger gap (e.g. pull them tight and there's still a gap of a two finger width).  The next day I pedaled down by the river (Minnesota) on the gravel trail and needed to stop.  So I pulled my brakes as hard as I would have when they were mushy.  Slide and flip, right over the top.  It must have been impressive.  The two other cyclists down there who saw me looked a little shocked and then asked if I was ok.  I had a sock full of blood and some good holes in me and bent handlebars and brakes.  Everything was fixable, just beat up.

Then tonight, I laid it down.  I was down in Blackhawk Park and it's damp out.  So humid nothing is drying out.  So as I crossed the bridge at the lake, when I took a slight left, I realized that the normally dry moss on the wood of the bridge was slick as ice.  Looked just like a motorcycle going down on gravel.  Except on a pedestrian bridge.  Reminded me of when I flipped the bike upside on the ice on the way to work five years ago. I haven't discovered anything missing, although my water bottle went shooting down the bridge. Good bloody scuff on my elbow and I ripped my plastic toe clip loose on the side that hit the bridge.  It popped the two nuts right off the bolts.

All in all - could be way worse, and the bike is still working.  At least I think it is.  I still have to double check for all my spokes when it's brighter out.

A List I Never Made (one year later)

It occurred to me that in at least one place out here I should have a list of the (physical) damage from the accident, in case I ever need it:

• Collapsed left lung
• Hole in my left side used to aerate the left lung, left a nice (itchy) scar.
• Chipped tooth, left side.  Actually missing a chunk that Shirene patched.  She was pleased the patch seemed to take.
• Hole in my knee - from Regions, they put a post through my left leg just above the knee to keep it straight so the hip would heal.  Was supposed to take five minutes, then they kicked my wife out of the room and it took an hour.  There's a scar on both sides were the post was.
• Pain in my left knee - gotten better over time, but the knee actually has more of an ache than the hip ever does.  Feels I bit like I'd expect arthritis to feel.  Changing weather (see my last snow post) makes it worse.  Additionally, sometimes it itches like crazy (see the next bullet).
• Nerve damage in my left leg originating from a post hole - see the last bullet about kicking my wife out of the room.  The nerve pain extends all the way up the leg and crosses to the other side as well as slightly down.  It absolutely starts at the post hole and sometimes I can feel it cross from the inner side of the leg through the leg to the post hole scar on the outside, and then start to radiate up and down on the inside from the scar.  Originally, in the hospital, they told me the pain I was feeling in some private spots was jock itch (there's a post related to that in the history - it was a problem), but that went away and left behind the nerve pain which was what I'd actually been complaining about, it just happened to live under the other issue.  Gotten a bit better over the course of a year, but retraining that nerve is slow and if I exercise a lot, the nerve is the first thing to complain.
• 14 stitches, left side of my head, near the scar from my birthmark. Bit of scar tissue there, left side of the eye, but I worked it extensively while I was laying in bed recovering, so it's not as bad as it looked in the hospital pictures.
• Brain swelling - no longer an issue (I hope), but it was there and there was concern. My mother, sister, and wife were constantly watching for changes due to brain damage.  Except for one toilet seat incident, I seem fine in that regard.
• PTSD - my wife claims it's an issue.  I know what behaviors changed as a result of the accident, so I don't concur.  I know I slow down more for intersections than a normal person would.  I have to be able to see all the traffic coming.  I was paranoid about traffic before because of how often I ride a bicycle, but the accident took it up a notch.  Also ramped my paranoia about watching other people carefully so I'm not in an injury zone up a notch.  If you're in my space, I have a pretty close eye on your physical movements at all times.
• The hip - I broke both my acetabulum and sacrum.  The acetabulum was patched with two plates to hold it all together.  The sacrum was left to heal.  The hip does well most days, but if I push the exercise I can feel it start to ache a bit.  Hence the training prior to RAGBRAI so I don't end up weeping in a corn field unable to pedal another stroke.
• I almost forgot - there's a 14" scar on my left hip, rolls up toward my back across me bum.  I find it amusing in retrospect, because it looks very much like the outie version of the dent that was in the side of the Mustang.  I mirrored the damage to my car very well in a lot of respects.  Fun with metaphors!
• Broken clavicle.  Healed very fast - the doctor said in part because of the head damage.  There's a link there that they don't understand.  When I feel off my bicycle on the ice about two weeks ago and hurt my wrist, it took me a while to notice that the ache extended up my arm and into my shoulder.  Same place where it was broken before.  Probably not a coincidence.
• Me bum: Regions fed me all sorts of drugs to loosen my bowels while I was there to offset all the pain killers they were feeding me (e.g. narcotics).  Problem was, the nurses weren't actually checking the charts and wouldn't listen to me, so they didn't realize I was taking almost no pain killers whatsoever. The resulting side effects probably gave me the anal fissure I had to have surgery for only months later.   Surgery in that case was minimal, but it took six months to heal up.
• Large foreign objects in my lungs - these are the two small hamburger type chunks Regions Hospital lost despite being asked to retain them after checking what they were.  I always said their process ability sucks - their recent dumping of the remains of two babies in the laundry (one of which they can't find yet) sort of proves out that point.
• Glass in my mouth when I woke up - not damage, but if there were foreign "things" in my lungs, it's good to note they didn't get all the glass out in case they ever find a piece of safety glass in my lungs and don't know what it is.  "What's this?"  "Piece of a car..."
• Pneumonia (or some such lung infection - my local doc took care of it).

I think that's most of it that I can remember if you leave out night sweats, etc., which are really just side effects of other issues and went away.  Some scratches and nicks here and there otherwise, but overall, I'm in pretty good shape given that laundry list.

Life and Beth - II - Close to Home

As an addendum, I should add, it's not lost on me that almost exactly one year after my car accident, I went to a play where the wife is widowed and her annoying husband comes back from beyond the grave to try and run her life for her.  I've warned my wife that it was fortunate I did not die, because I fully attend to come back and haunt her.  But I won't be so blatant about the haunting.  It will be more along the lines of leaving extra Luna bar wrappers around so she blames Eryn.  Leaving cupboard doors ajar.  Hiding spoons in the garbage disposal.  Unplugging oft used appliances.  Moving things slightly here and there.  Hiding keys and sunglasses.  Come to think of it, you'd think she was already haunted how often she complains about those things happening.  It'll be nice to just sit back and watch and let her think I'm doing the haunting.

As a reminder to myself, I need to create a good haunting list and hide it somewhere safe.  I don't want to forget anything when the time comes.

(P.S. Mean Mr. Mustard.  I'm going to haunt you just a bit as well because your wife will probably assume it's me, but she'll blame you, and I'd hate to mess up her expectations just because I'm dead).

Spill

On the way to work this morning, I took a nice tumble.  I've been trying to avoid the ice, but found myself trapped on the trail with the choice of either braving the ice or walking off the curb.  I should have walked off the curb, but instead I slowly (e.g. just an mph or two) traversed the ice until I noticed it had a chasm in the middle.  I went to put my foot down and the whole bicycle shot sideways and I flipped up and landed solidly on my back, hard enough to knock all the wind out of me, and mashed my left hand.  After a moment, I struggled into an upright position, only to watch a bicyclist roll by without asking so much as whether I was ok.  My back wasn't too bad, but my left wrist hurt quite a bit.  So I crawled on my bike and figured I'd worry about the details at work.

Ahead of me, the unfriendly guy pedaled on in all his super cool winter bicycling garb.  Then took a left turn into the work lot.  By the time he made it to the office racks, I was pulling up next to him.  He looked at the sky.  Looked at his feet.  Stared for a very long time at his lock.  Slowly pulled off his gloves.  Looked anywhere but at me.  I wasn't impressed, but he was correct that he was to be shamed for not at least pretending to check.

My back ached: still aches.  Mostly it feels like I've been lifting weights.  But my wrist is the bigger issue.  Swelling below the thumb, and at the bottom of the swelling is a knot about the size of a bb. If I touch my pinky and thumb together, which I can do, but it hurts, the little bump pops up.  My wife thinks it's a ganglion cyst that showed up because of the strain on the wrist.  Might be, although the bump itself doesn't hurt significantly.  Primarily, the wrist is just stiff and hard to use.  Although tonight I can use it to do things (that sounds wrong, so let me point out I'm right handed), and right after the spill I couldn't even hold my phone or empty coffee cup without pain.

Once I was at work, I took a few Advil and Tylenol, like I have in the past for pain.  And launched into an almost three hour allergic reaction.  My eyes turned very red and swelled, until I almost couldn't see, I started sniffling, a headache erupted, and everything itched.  Everything.  Both my wife and my team lead told me I looked awful.  So when the allergic reaction wore off, I went and found some Aleve, which doesn't seem to cause problems.  That reaction might explain a lot of my allergic reactions in the past.  But I don't know if it's Advil or Tylenol, and I'm not particularly interested in experiments to determine the specific culprit.

I biked home later despite the wrist.  As long as I kept it straight, it wasn't a problem.  Although I'd hate to rely on it in a second tumble.  Bicycling made my back feel better, but didn't do anything for my wrist.  It's probably a little stiffer just because I'm not typing with it anymore (well, I wasn't).  On the way home it snowed.  Then rained.  Reminded me of Ironman weather.  And right before the house, I happened upon another cyclist in our neighborhood.  I said to her, "The weather this morning was much nicer."  She rolled her eyes at me - not a nice "I know" roll, but a "You're an ass, leave me alone, roll" - and went her way without a word.  I'm going to call April 5th Rude Bicyclist Day.

Biking Season 2013

My new-ish bicycle, parked outside work for the first morning this year.  No trailer yet.  Didn't seem necessary.  I'll get it hooked up this weekend in case I need it.  It was cold enough out that I could wear work clothes and not worry about sweating through everything, even with fleece pants and a ski jacket on.  It did create a potential problem for lunch because we were all going out with Sean for his second-to-last day as a contractor, and bicycling to lunch is slow, but Sean gave me a ride in his classic (e.g. cheaper) Jaguar.  Nice lunch - we did the all you can eat sushi in Eagan.

The only big issue on the way to work was the ice on the trails.  Over by Glacier Hills, on the hill, there was enough ice that I just started louge-ing at one point.  Scary if you're on a bike with a laptop on your back.  The bike is great.  I'm not exactly shooting along at top speeds, but it was a replacement for my mountain bike and carries me along at a comfortable 10 mph, just like the mountain bike did.

Amusingly, or disturbingly, once I got to work and swapped from my leather boots (thank you internet for recommending them as appropriate footwear) to my brown dress shoes, this fell out of my dress shoe.  50 weeks later, and I'm still finding safety glass from the Mustang.  I didn't keep this piece.  I have my bag full of glass and a picture is sufficient.

Glass

This is a picture of the office wall closest to my head at work.  That's a bag full of the Mustang glass from the accident, including the piece I picked out from between my teeth (despite assurances from everyone it wasn't there) after being in a coma.  Any time I'm feeling a bit ornery at work, these pieces of glass do a great job of getting me back to a state of calm.  There's not much anyone can do that's worse than the accident.

I'm not generally the type to need mementos (an organized serial killer type).  Most days I'm fairly well grounded in the larger scheme of things.  But I find these surprisingly useful.  They remind me of the hospital and how miserable I felt, both physically and mentally, worrying about my family and whether I'd be bicycling and/or walking and trying not to hurt.  Puts everything else in perspective: everything else in a space relative to the accident.  On a continuum, that pushes everything else to the far end of the spectrum, or makes the spectrum so large that they appear to be stuffed up against the end for meaningless minutia.

Heavy Lifting

I keep our Christmas tree up in the rafters of the garage.  Not the pine variety.  We got rid of that a long time ago in favor of a fabricated tree.  Not to avoid mess.  It still sheds needles.  But to avoid the trip, selection, return trip, and maintenance of a real tree.  I miss the smell a little, but there are pine trees near my house I can visit if I need a fix, and I can even haul some needles back if I need the smell.

According to my tree, which seems to get heavier every single year (I'm sure it is, it must be picking up something from the air or the ornaments), standing on a ladder and shoving it around on my own is not recommended.  In the past, I didn't think too much of this warning.  But this year, with the plated/screwed hip, standing on a ladder, balancing slightly backward while I gave it a shove onto the hanging planks, my leg gave me a warning that my years lofting it up there might be numbered or, at the very least, that I should heed the sign and come up with a new storage location.  I don't think I'm in any danger of breaking the hip unless I fall.  But I do suspect I'm in more danger of falling given that my leg seems to have shifted length a bit and I'm not as balanced as I once was.  It's very seldom an issue.  However, shoving heavy boxes over my head, and vigorously hopping out of bed in the morning, seem to be edge cases.  The bed statement might be perplexing, but picture hopping up and getting going before your brain and body are really ready, which is often how I get going because I long ago convinced myself half the lying around in bed issue people seem to have is just not popping up as soon as you can.  The result is a lean against the wall because my balance doesn't autocorrect quickly enough to tell me where my shoulder is in relation to the wall.  Coupled with a malfunctioning Marvin the Martian anamatronic art hanging that sticks out a few inches that I now bump into now and then, I know for a fact I lean a little when I get up more than I used to (although the odd klutzy moment in the past had me bumping it, so it's not a unique experience, only different in terms of frequency).

I notice as well that I should get entirely different people to lift my tree box, because both of those guys seem to be much younger, more coiffed men.

Pelvis

I don't think I've ever posted a picture of my pelvis post accident.  This is from 7/16/12, so three months after I broke it.  Those are some nice nails and plates on my left.  The scale on the right of the picture says 20 cm, so I think the one is 12 cm long and the other is about 7 cm.  So about 7.5 inches end to end, with overlap?  The scar is about 12-13 inches, so they had some working space.  Glad they didn't have to re-operate to put the extra plate/s in for reinforcement.  This seems like more than enough.

Surgery

Ow, damn it. Went in for surgery this morning as a result of the accident.  Despite how wonderful it is to share a bit of fistula history with Louis XIV, Pope Leo X, and Charles Dickens, I wouldn't wish this on anyone.  I say it's a result of the accident because, during recovery at the hospital, rather than review my charts between shifts, the med folks in attendance just assumed I was on heavy duty pain killers and prescribed a bunch of laxatives to offset potential constipation.  Instead, without the pain killers, and only a load of laxatives, I had the opposite problem, which can lead to a fistula.  Even after I told the nursing staff I wasn't taking pain killers and I didn't want laxatives, I had to argue with them to force the issue.  Until they did some research, they were pretty sure I was wrong.

On a positive note, what was induced was probably the least worrisome kind of fistula and only cut through a very small amount of muscle.  So not much cutting was necessary.  Just a nick and a pair of gauze underwear.  And since when did they add a heated air pump to surgical gowns?  It's weird to see something named "Bair Paws" (a 3M product) with a paw on it.  Makes you feel like you're at the Vet.

My sister took me in and dropped me off, and then I sat around in a bed for over two hours waiting for a fifteen minute surgery. It was actually fairly pleasant, because I spent a big chunk of that time just taking a nap.  Apparently the guy in surgery before me was, and I quote my surgeon, "A five time loser" when it came to fistulotomies.  That is some bad genetics or luck.  Despite the general anesthesia, I was up and about pretty quick and home by about 3:30.  Hurts, but it's bearable.  I took some of the pain killers they gave me to see if it would offset the feeling of being kicked in the balls, if it wasn't in your balls, but was in your a**, but a bath works about 100x better than vicodin. I'm tempted to sleep in the tub tonight.

Annoying to go in for surgery, but I have to say as far as surgical procedures go, at least this one was in, out, and I'm back at work on Monday.  Though I definitely won't be bicycling this weekend.

The Ramp is No More

My Dad was here last weekend with his enormous truck and an offer to take all my 4x8 pieces of plywood up to his giant dumpster at the cabin where he's dumping all the garage construction debris.  So the ramp is gone, along with yet one more toad and a two mouse nests.  I was mean to the mouse nests and they are now mulch.  The toad I was nicer to and John helped herd him off to the side where he wouldn't get hurt.  The 2x4s under the 4x8s smell of mold.  I can't open the trash can where the odds and ends from them are without holding my breath.  Nasty stuff.  The 4x4s I kept as they're treated and I can turn them into some sort of Summer of '12 Memorial Planter and Garden.  Maybe I'll put my cane and toilet bars out there to grow some vines on.

Remember I said my friends built it to last with more nails than you might expect?  This is one of my favorite pictures from ramp deconstruction.  The crowbar was instrumental in prying a few of these apart.

Ramp Deconstruction

The ramp is coming down.  Slowly, so I can dispose of it in a cheap manner.  I'd rather spend my money on a circular saw than on a dumpster bag.  So I'm prying it all up and cutting it all into bite-sized pieces.  The 4x4s get set to the side for reuse.  And the 2x4s, which have a lot of damage and nails are getting cleaned up and turned into a large Jenga set for when we have visitors.  That, and a bit of it might be used for redoing the deck steps which are rotting away.  These 4x8s are the target of the circular saw.  I'd keep them, but they're in really rough shape after several months on the ground, and there's some mold and about 4 dozen nails (or nail holes) in each.  I'd need a quarter of putty per board to reuse them for the shed.

I have to say, my friends put the ramp together so that it wouldn't fall apart beneath my wheel chair.  That's a lot of heavy lumber, and in places it's sunk into the ground for leveling purposes.  I have a big crowbar for dismantling everything, but it's more than just simple popping things loose.  And I have to be careful, because I find myself using my leg with the plate and pin to hold down a piece of lumber while hammering in the crowbar or bending a piece of semi-cut wood to snap it loose.  I'm well aware that using my leg as a lever is probably an easy way to inadvertently knock something out of whack.  I was careful not to play paintball yesterday at Ron's island, but instead sat in a chair in the safe area and yelled "Go" for rounds.  The idea of taking a paintball to the hip seemed to be just below roller skating on the safety continuum. 

You can see the dirt that's under the 4x8s in the above picture.  I'm using the recycling bin from a generation ago in Eagan as a riser while I cut.  I have the boards face down so some poor kid or dog doesn't take a nail to the foot, but I flip them over to cut so I don't take the circular saw to a nail.

Looks like I'm digging in rock, but that's where the ramp builders dug down to make sure everything was level.  That's my new neighbor Jeff's super cool hose caddy next door.  Leave it alone.

There were several toads living under the ramp.  All summer we've had toads hopping around that Luna (our dog) keeps trying to catch, and one even made it into the house and was hopping around by the Xbox 360.  

 Apparently this was the perfect breeding ground for toads, so I don't know what they're going to do now that their habitat is gone.

I wanted to make sure I removed the wood from the back of the house today, even if I don't get it all disposed of for the next several weeks.  Feels a little more normal walking the dog out to her pen if I'm not stepping on the wood platform.  My wife swept it up so it looks like it was never there (except for that mess at the end).

The 2x4s, currently full of a variety of nails.  Picture them all cut up in 16" sections stacked four wide by as high as I have sets of four.  Jenga!  I'm sure some child will eventually be pinned under a stack of wood in a tragic Jenga accident.  Then I'll have to turn the 16" sections back into a ramp.

I was my own victim today.  Like some idiot, I took the hammer to the end of the crowbar without removing my hand first.  Like the world's biggest nail.  Sure, it's easy to grab the shaft of the crowbar instead, and I'd been doing it all day, but who the hell has time to make sense.  It doesn't look nearly as bad as it is in person.  That hand aches.  But I didn't break anything, not even the skin - just a big blood blister.  I told my wife it's one of my weird superpowers.  I heal quicker than usual, like a sub-par Wolverine.  I conduct electricity, like a crappy Thor.  And now I'm invulnerable, like Superman.  But just my skin.  My innards can still be pulped.  So given enough force, I'll just be liquid in a bag.

Brain Damage

Kyle, Adam and I were talking yesterday, during a road trip to Wisconsin, and I pointed out that my wife was worried about me, in part because I'd left the toilet seat up, which I hadn't done once during almost 20 years of marriage.  She's worried my behavior may be different since the accident, organically different, and I think the toilet seat is a sign.  I disagree - perhaps consciously different. If anything, I feel pretty relaxed, and yet, more focused, lately.  Organized is a good word.

I posited - to Adam and Kyle - whether it wouldn't be amusing to leave the toilet seat up now and then, just to have a bit of, admittedly dark, fun.  Kyle thought I should actually take it up a level and put ketchup on my food now and then, and maybe have some mustard or salad dressing.  All condiments to which my aversion is well known.  The only thing more unlike me would be to show up wearing overalls and humming "Come on Eileen."

So now this is just a test to see if she reads my blog.  Otherwise it might be random toilet seating.  At least until Eryn falls in.  And a bit of ketchup on my food when she thinks I'm not really paying attention to anyone.

Ironically, this morning, we were at breakfast in Woodbury at The New Woodbury Cafe with Ming and son and Cookie Queen.  Ming Jr. (I use Logan's name elsewhere, so that's just a nice way not to call him Fourth Place, although he did point out I'm currently "Last Place") offered me a bet to eat some ketchup.  Albeit after trying to bet me I couldn't eat a container of jam or some creamer.  I don't think he has this bet thing quite figured out yet.  Or perhaps it's less about getting me to do something crazy and more about making me jump like a monkey at his beck and call.  I had to think a long time before disagreeing to take his money, and in the end it was his mother wanting to quash his gambling behavior that really swung the decision.  Opportunity one lost.

Morphology and Other Things

I had a few pictures floating around that I hadn't posted yet, so I thought I'd get them out here.

Eryn and I played Morphology for the first time.  You need at least four people (so teams) to play - but we gave it a test run just to understand it and see how it played.  This is the first creation done with our set.  Eryn was doing "Island".

This was my first attempt, "Seahorse".  It's difficult!  I think it's one of those things you need to wrap your brain around so you get good at the game.  But by the end, I guessed Bubble Bath, so we must have been getting better.  Either at guessing or modeling.  While we were playing in the garage, I put the postcards from the Kickstarter fundraiser back in the box and noticed one told me to "recover soon"!  That's what I get for not deconstructing it earlier.  Apparently Erik told Kate (who created Morphology) that I'd been in an accident.

A picture from the Day by Day Cafe this morning.  A bit of a celebration as I go back to work tomorrow.

I knew it, but Words with Friends proved it.  It didn't surprise me that it didn't deny it was a word, only that he's unacceptable.

Ming did his business on my driveway.  While I was incapacitated he seal coated by driveway, which was rolling up snow into what looked like cinnamon rolls of ice and rock last winter.  Took three tubs of seal coat.  So not a small job.  I'm very appreciative.  It's nice not to have my driveway crumbling to pieces, and I don't think I could have gone after it for a few more months.  Although I am going to ask the physical therapy folks if I can use my electric chain saw on the half of a maple that pitched over during the last big storm. 

One Fourth

I don't think I've ever stated it, but when I was at my heaviest I was 285 pounds.  Shoes off.  Just before 2011 I decided to lose weight.  A lot of weight.  I blogged before that I plateaued for a while, and just before the accident I was refocused on starting the downward trend again.  The afternoon before my accident I'd been out geocaching in the heat near work.  I bumped into two local cachers, ASL Girl and Found Unicorn.  They were on their way out of the loop.  I was on my way in.  But we intersected on a difficult cache that wasn't at ground zero and required several sets of eyes.  I was a sweaty mess by the time I got done looking for the caches around the small pond/lake, particularly after I'd crawled under the local bridge for an hour with no luck (I think I walked for closer to 2.5 hours).

While the accident interrupted my ability to exercise, being in a coma for a while achieved pretty much the same thing.  So I'm at my lowest weight since my freshman year of college.  Between 208 and 210 depending on the clinic scale.  75 pounds.  I officially lost one fourth of me, despite having a new chunk of metal in my hip.  That has to weigh more than bone, right?  And the bone is growing back, so that just makes it extra.

I'm supposed to be back on my feet around the 25th of June at which point, if I can't ride an upright bike, I suspect I'll find a recumbent to buy or rent just so I have some way to exercise.  My original goal for this year was to get past the plateau at 220-225 and get down to 200.  So despite people telling me I look thin after the accident, it's still 8-10 pounds heavier than my goal.  200 is a nice weight.  Round number.  15 pounds heavier than high school.  But I don't spend 4 hours a day playing tennis and basketball and running for an hour now, so I have no delusions about going that low.  Not to mention, I don't want to chance it that I'd be the right size to fit into my old gray jeans jacket with matching gray jeans should they still be stored away somewhere.  That would be a serious fashion faux pas.

Visions

My sister said that last post might freak people out.  I tried to frontload quite a bit of text so that the photos were further down the page, offering a chance to bail.  I try to observe a bit of blogging etiquette.  That post was about my body after the accident.  This post will be about my brain.  The thinky part, not the mushy gray and pink part.  Although as far as I'm concerned, they're one and the same.  No thinky without the mushy.

I had a lot of hallucinations while I was in the hospital.  I tried to catch some of them in a writing notebook Erik Hyrkas gave me.  What's below doesn't include the bugs crawling on the ceiling.  Or all the people standing in the road near where the hospital helicopter would land.  Or the endless, dimly lit, cells, stacked off into infinity where I though they parked my moveable bed shortly after I came out of the coma, an infinite number of patients above, below and beyond me, my own cell destined to enter a rotation as new patients entered cells behind me.  Or my daughter's picture, which for a moment, despite knowing what it was, who it was, and that it was just ten feet away, looked like a man with several bottles in his hand.  That was more upsetting than almost anything, because it's frightening to think you might not recognize the people you love.

So here are a few of the things I saw.  I don't think I capture how truly real they felt at the time, despite knowing that I'd just closed my eyes (or not) and even telling myself as I did, "I'm probably going to see something weird.  It's not real."

...

I close my eyes.  Only for a moment. Not a blink.  Shut, then open.  Purposeful.  Barely the time between two thoughts.

I see a German movie.  1930s.  Black and white.  Images scroll across the lit front of a grandiose theater of old stone and early 1900s sensibilities, the film playing across the facade as a way to entice theatergoers inside.  It's Berlin.  Somehow I know.  Although nothing on the theater states Berlin.  My only hint is lettering that subvocalized sounds German in nature.  But despite the size of the city and the premier happening in what is a first rate theater, there is no one about.  Only the theater and the movie.  Behind the credits, the full movie doesn't play outside, I see rolling waves crashing against a rocky beach, revealing the names of producers and stars.  Or at least what appear to be those roles, given my nonexistent German language skills.  In the lower right in large white letters, I see that the main actress is Eina Rance.  A name unknown to me, in either incarnation.

Open.  That wasn't bad.  It's been worse.

Close.

An ocean.  Old.  So very old.  Beneath the thick, bubble-filled water, it's obvious the only life is nothing with which I'm familiar.  Rather than gently undulate, the water slides and oozes across itself, forming those sticky bubbles.  Where the bubbles coalesce, the green water transforms to viscous red.  Something is rising.  Welling up from the deep, just like the blood.  Is the blood residue from what it's eaten?  Or is it oozing from the creature's pores, like sweat?  Or is it saliva, a sign of depthless hunger?  I don't want to know.

Open. So tired.  So tired.

Close.

Roiling darkness.  Rolling directly at me.  A thing like the hidden thing in the ocean, but emerging from thick, oily clouds.  Larger than the largest whale.  It's not an animal.  It thinks.  It sees.

Open.

Pigeons. The dream catcher near my bed a friend hung on my wall.  It has three clutches of feathers adorning its ring.  Now there are three pigeons, as large as my hand.  Dead.  Hanging there as if clipped up by their necks, their bodies loose and rustling in the wind of a closed room.  No, not rustling.  Twitching.  Constantly.  They're dead.  But they're not dead.  An my eyes are open.  I can't tell if these zombie pigeons are imaginary or real.  Maybe it doesn't matter.  Because they're here and in pain, unsure why they're mounted on a native american dream catcher and subject to so many poisonous dreams from the nearby human.  I refuse to look away.  If I do, someone in the room will know I see them.

Close.

It's a ship.  Like a spaceship.  But underground.  And I'm captaining it from above, third person, I think.   So it must be a video game, unless I'm dreaming myself into Ender's Game.  I direct the ship left.  Right.  Forward.  Although I can't tell if I'm directing it, or just following its autonomous direction and narrating in my head.  It rolls under a farm.  A small, fenced in area containing half a dozen sheep.  The fence and sheep stick to the ground wake of the subteranean vehicle and are pulled along behind.  Like two magnets on either side of a table.  Ten dollars.  Taxes collected.  What?  The ship rolls under a barn and farm house.  They also stick.  There's now a conglomeration of small fields, buildings, and various field animals trailing along behind.  Fifty dollars.  Taxes collected.  It is a video game.  The goal seems to be to make as many cities, houses, animals, and farms stick to the ship as possible to accumulate taxes and upgrades.  It's like Katamari Damacy meets The Sims.  There are children and whole families bouncing along in the ground wake.  This vision suddenly disturbs me more than most.  Maybe it's my history degree influencing me to innately avoid taxation without representation.  Maybe I'm worried this is real and all those animals and people are being dragged from their homes at my whim, and tumbled along, bruised, battered, and dead, in some remote locale.

Open.

I focus on the zebra pillow pet my daughter brought to the hospital.  His name is Stripe.  Because he's striped.  Black and white with a pink belly.  My daughter has the smaller version so we have a connection while I'm laid up from my accident, separated by a city.  She named him something obvious, something easy.  I appreciate it as I don't always retain what people tell me at the moment.  I hope Stripe's colors are what I first see when I close my eyes.  Or the zebra pattern.  I want to control what I see.  Not be subject to random access channels, like someone is signal surfing in my brain.

Still open.

The blinds cast a golden glow in the room.  They're metal, with words engraved in the vertical slats.  And I can see the light coming through the filigreed writing.  I can see the light as it crosses the room.  Not just where it hits the wall.  It's as though the light is solid.  Or slowed.  Like in a Discworld novel.  Which amuses me for a moment before part off me remembers I'm not in Discworld, I'm in a hospital room, awake.  The words, where they free float in the air, twist and snap, leaving little loops and fragments of gold in the air, like fine wire.  And the loops glow with reflected sunshine.  And grow.  Fractally.  They grow off visitors.  Off the end of my bed.  Through the glass window and down the wall.  Out of my toes.  They curl and curl and curl.  Then break and drift to the floor and through the air, like shiny dust motes.  I'm afraid I'll breath in the metal shards.   Breathing fine metal wire can't be good for your lungs.  And my collapsed left lung already has enough problems without growing wire.

Look at Stripe again.  Fix the pattern.

Close.

Damn.  No Zebra colors.  Wood cuts.  Like out of a 16th or 17th century manuscript.  All of them variations on Satan punishing sinners.  Something out of Dante's Inferno.  And as in the Inferno, these woodcuts appear to have been carved by a first person witness to the events.  They're full of horror, pain, and glee in the face of each demon or Satanic entity (I didn't know there were Satanic entities that weren't demons) in charge of dolling out punishment.  The cuts are wood, but you can feel the blood and pain oozing from their carved lines, almost see the red and clear viscous liquids that might be blood and thickened tears.  There are hundreds of cuts.  And though my eyes are only closed for a moment, I see them all and know there are millions of others in the collection.  I'd see them all if I kept my eyes closed long enough.

Warning: Not For Everyone - Coma Time

My wife was nice enough to take pictures of me right after the accident, in my coma.  She was of the opinion that if I ever woke up, I'd want to see the damage.  It's not particularly pretty, although at least there's only a little blood, a neck brace, and a bunch of tubes, and not chunks of me hanging loose, eyes missing, or large machines helping me breathe.  There is a tube in my chest, via the side, you just can't see it.

So here's your warning, again.  These are pictures of me in a coma in the hospital after my accident.  If you get squeamish looking at hospital pics, you might want to just move on.  But then again, they could be much worse.  She Says was particularly interested in seeing them, so I dedicate this post to her.

Mostly it looks like I'm taking a machinery assisted nap.

Closer up, so you can appreciate the head damage.  My hair is much longer now.  I'd just had a haircut.  Haven't had one since the accident and I'm looking a little bushy.  The bleeding areas are just some small scaring and only one cut has any sort of deeper scar tissue under it.  Nothing bad - it all just makes a matching set with my old forehead scar from having my birthmark removed.

Even closer.  She's going for that flea on the butt of a rat in the belly of a cat at the bottom of the sea metaphor.

I like this one because Stripe, the zebra, is in the picture.  Eryn brought me Stripe to keep me company and she kept the mini pillow pet (tm), Pattern, so we had a connection.  Awfully nice of her.  The zebra was later very useful for getting rid of my hallucinations.  I'll blog about those later.

An awful close up picture.  I'm more mortified about the baldness and chin rolls than I am the tubes and blood.  I once read about a woman who started a business to make sure women with cancer could have makeup and other services, so they felt confident while locked up in a hospital bed.  Found it...Look Good, Feel Better.  Although I don't imagine there's anyway to prevent a certain slackness to the face laying on your back passed out and covered with a few days of stubble.

Looking much better now, at least in my opinion.

Catching Up

Despite being in a coma and a car accident, I believe I'm catching up with some of the miscellaneous things in life.  Things such as getting a week of Snarkies queued up, including one about the bus factor that ties to my accident (Mean Mr. Mustard gave me the idea, although he probably doesn't know it).  Those wouldn't seem like they require a lot of work, but between modifying the images, coming up with new ideas, creating content now that we're worrying more about SEO, and adding all the little image and textual bells and whistles to optimize keywords, it's some work, at least when you queue up five at once.

And reading.  It's end of May, and I have about 1300 pages to read by end of June to be on target for what seems to be my median of 14000 pages per year (except the year when I became a manager and almost gave up reading for six months while I struggled to understand the job).  Given that averages to about 1200 pages/month, I should be about on target, particularly as I already have about 300 pages behind me between two things I'm currently reading, one of which is over 500 pages.  While it might seem obvious I'd read more, being stuck in the basement, enough to make up for my time in the hospital, the real issue is that I didn't know if I was reading as much as in the past because I hadn't updated my database since the end of last August.  So I just moved it to Dropbox so I could always find it and updated it with about thirty books.  Trying to remember when I read them is a big challenge.  I believe I may be off by a few days here and there.  I still use the database, despite also playing around with Goodreads, because some things, like reading the Harvard Business Review issue end to end or a random story off Interzone don't work so well at a site dedicated to books.  I have refrained from putting my own book on the list a.) because it's not done (140-some pages currently), and b.) I wouldn't know how to input the fact that I've read it half a dozen times already in various stages.  I believe it'll get entered just once, when I get done and publish it.

Tomorrow is bill day.  Talking to various folks about accident-related bills and insurance and taking care of rental properties, etc.  To every day there is a thing, turn turn...

Photographic Proof I'm at Least Somewhat Healthy

A little bit of photographic proof I'm not doing too bad.  From a couple weeks ago, and then from last Sunday.  I look healthy, although perhaps a bit tired.  You can see a little bit of the scarring on my face in the first one.  Very minimal.  Gives me character and keeps my other scar company.

If you know me fairly well, you'll recognize that I do look a bit thinner.  A couple of days of coma knocked about fourteen (14) pounds off my frame.  Given I track my weight and food, it's an amusing downward drop on my weight chart.  Nothing serious.  It was my goal to head to this weight, and even a little lighter, by end of year.  I suspect, despite the lack of activity, I may still be losing a bit of mass as it's obvious some of my bicycling muscle is atrophying.

Squashed

While we were at the impound lot signing the car over to the insurance company and picking up personal effects, we took some pictures of the Mustang.  This doesn't quite capture how messed up it is because virtually every electronic bit in the front area was busted, and other parts in the "cab" were all bent.  But it's a nice series for capturing the damage to the driver's side, where I was sitting and how that spilled over to the hood and rear panel.

Side photo.  You can see where the other car's bumper impacted.


Closer up.  Note all the pieces in the back seat from the rest of the car.


The front of the car.


The impact shattered all the loose bits.


Looking at the damage, I'm think I'm lucky to be alive.  If I had still been driving the plastic Saturn, I think more of the impact would have gone into me directly instead of being distributed across the body of the car.

Coals to Newcastle...or something like that

It's bad enough not being able to get around other than at a slow shuffle because of a busted leg and arm.  What's worse is getting extremely ill so that getting to the bathroom quickly is a necessity.  Maybe I'll use it as my example when people ask me to define irony in the future.  On a positive note, while I'm on short term disability, I don't have to take a sick day.