Making things happen

This was going to be a very busy month. My personal goal was managing to ride BRMA, my friends' four day bicycling extravaganza through central Wisconsin. For me, this is a particularly big deal because it meant starting the summer in much better condition than I have in a long time. We were riding 50 miles per day and were about 30 miles into day three when I took a curve too hot and went into the ditch. In one sense, mission accomplished. I was definitely keeping up, although we all know I took more stops on those monster hills than anyone else.

Upon return from BRMA, I was headed to Minneapolis to learn more about a peer norming model for dealing with young adult alcohol abuse, then a big family trip to Ithaca New York to see Greg and John (senior brother in law and spouse) and then visit New York City.

Things happen in slow motion and they happen very quickly. I remember feeling the rear end of the bike coming around and realizing that I was not going to make the curve and saying, out loud "ooooh, nooooooooo!." Then I remember being on my face in the tall grass, feeling a lot of blook gushing from my nasal area, and realizing that my back hurt badly. I also remember wiggling toes and fingers and feeling pretty good that they wiggled back.

Two of of the boys were behind me and went right by me, since I flew quite a way over my handlebars and was not visible from the road. I crawled to the road and used the phone in my fanny pack to tell my pals they were going to have to ride back over two hills to come find me. Didn't take them long either. Keith took a good look, called 911 and said "we're going to get you a ride." We all decided I should lie down again.

The folks from the local ambulance service came out and quickly summmoned a helicopter. The sherriff said I did not smell like beer. This is because it was bloody hot out there and I was one big metabolizing boy. I mentioned "good insurance" and they were all over that helicopter. No one wanted to be the first to move me.

Life flight to Madison was claustrophobic and someone said somehting about a torn lung which didn't help. I was just panicking at the time, trying to get air, and people had all kinds of stuff in my face. I knew my lungs were okay, or was pretty sure, but couldn't talk to anyone about it. All I could see was an air vent overhead. They did give me some very good drugs on the 'copter.

At Madison, they did about 300 CT scans and an MRI, mostly without pain meds. All you guys who snoozed through Lamaze class and didn't learn to breathe through pain, you have only yourselves to blame. Best class I ever took. The verdict:

C 1 - the section of your spine that connects to your head - fractured and intact.
T2, T3 - spine behind your heart, between your shoulder blades - smooshed. These bad boys will be fused.
Fosset fracture of the facial region - means that my face was broken all sorts of ways and kind of mashed in.

My friend Geof describes this all in terms of "crumple zones" to protect the brain. My face took it, and my spine took it, so my brain can still function.

While all this diagnostic work was going on, everyone in the Central Wisconsin area was busy getting into worse trauma than me. I mean really, how does a middle aged bike accident compete with an SUV full of boy scouts? Poor little fellas with their futures ahead of them, lying strewn all over the Emergency suite trying not to die. I on the other hand, was perfectly stable (miserable, and stable), a redundant baby boomer recreationalist taking up space. Bottom line, after 10 hours of surgery my spinal dude made me wait a day. A 97 hour, flat on the back, thank God U Madison nurses are beautiful day.

Spinal surgery on Monday was a trip. Because no one was totally sure what the damage was to C1, which is pretty damned important connection, I got to be intibated while awake. Now this is something I don't recommend. It's all about not gagging when the nice man puts a tube down your airway. Counerintuitive to say the least. It took a while, and he was very patient.

My neurosurgeon, Dr. Sillay, is a very nice man and really seemed to know what he was doing. What impressed me is the degree to which he was truly "winging it." You don't know what things really look like until you're "in there." It's all about position. Once I was unconscious, they screwed into my skull and suspended me face down so that I was absolutely fixed in place. They monitored my brain and nerve function throughout the procedure, which took about 6.5 hours. Apparently the monitoring did not always indicate good news. At one point I was not responding well. When I awoke in recovery, Robyn told me my toes were wiggling! I remember none of that. I remember the next day, though, when they took the intibation out, looking at my wiggly toes over and over again. Wiggly fingers, too!

Thanks to Katie and the Crawley sisters for the visit, plant (Bromeliad!), and good wishes. Sorry I was such a zombie.

The day after surgery I was a star. I walked and talked and demonstrated my happiness that I could walk and talk! We decided to get back home and then arranged for the facial reconstructive surgery in Iowa City. My friends located the best plastic surgeon in the area and we set up a consult for Friday morning. I was discharged on a Thursday morning and Robyn drove me home. I don't recommend riding in a car as part of post-op rehab. We got me into bed and then bright and early Friday, off to UI we went to see the plastic surgeon, who I want to call Lambert. This turned out to be an all day thing, and I was just NOT on enough pain meds. Ow!

Next day Dr. Lambert re-wired my face. Yikes! The good news is that I'm solid and that this will heal. Bad news? No way can a fella eat like this. I'm constantly trying to get food in and it just doesn't on-load that fast. I'm losing weight like, well like a guy with his jaw wired shut! It's also hard to enounciate. This involves peeling my lips back from the wiring and then talking with parts of one's mouth that are "inside" the wire. A little like ventriloquism, maybe. I was a little worried that I'd just not be able to breathe inside here, but it's working pretty well. I'm learning to slam protein shakes and smoothies. I can also still drink coffee. Yay. Coffee.

I am having to learn to be glib. I need to choose a phrase and get it said during the small window of opportunity that may arise when someone can hear me. I suspect I won't be working much until I can get my jaw loose.

At any rate, that's what it's like in here and where I'm at physically. I think there's enough information here to catch most folks up and to serve as a springboard for further musings. It's not the physical stuff that is really messing with my head at this point. What a surprise!