Ghost Pepper Salsa
Warm and good flavor but not ‘scary hot’ as the label warns. Mrs. Renfroe’s Ghost Pepper Salsa. It was nice, but it wasn’t hot sauce it was salsa.
Fort Walton Beach
Fort Walton Beach, originally uploaded by erictwright.
Yeah, I know I used a cheesy filter, don’t judge me.
I want to go to there….
I know I used a cheesy Photoshop Action, but darn it, I like it.
Ft. Walton Beach
Sunset, Beach, Palm Trees and the Girl. Life is good. More photos to come. I even shot some film . . . black and white even.
Lynksey Twilight Criterium
So much fun, I didn’t get to race, but I got to see a friend tear it up.
Crash 2011- Part II
This is my ongoing attempt to blog about the crash I experienced July. Check out my first installment here:
Carol’s Part 1 here and Part 2 here
So last I left you dear reader, I had figured out a way to exit my ad hoc ambulance and as being wheeled into the Gadsden Regional Emergency Room.
I was inspired to finish up this blog post, because as I was getting ready this morning I found my cross necklace, the one I was wearing the morning of the accident and that Carol and I thought we lost when I took it off to go for the MRI or X-rays- it was put aside in a rush – and we thought it had been discarded, but in fact it been carefully placed in the pouch I use as a wallet n the road- a sign it was to finish the blog.
I remember being wheeled up to the reception desk and being asked a bunch of vital statistics and wishing that I could hand them my medical info card and they could just read it themselves. The pain was kicking in from all over my body and I just wanted to get on with what I assumed would be the painful next steps of getting bandaged up. In retrospect I am fortunate that it was early-ish on a Wednesday morning- not exactly primetime for a small town hospital which diminished the potential embarrassing fact of being wheeled around in my bright orange and white cycling kit. As Pro cyclist Ted King put it after a wreck in a race “If you ever think you look really cool while wearing spandex, try walking through the downtown Philadelphia hospital ER.@imatedking”
So they get me quickly to a room after debating for a few minutes on which room I should go to, they settled on (I think) room 9 just outside the nurses’ station. The indecision gave Carol time to park the car and catch up with me.
The first hurdle was getting up from the wheelchair into the bed- that was fun, all I remember was getting help half standing up an intense waves of nauseating grating pain, which flared up when I tried to lean back on the bed.
A business-like doc came in and introduced herself as Dr. Jones. She gave me the once over and proclaimed that it felt like my shoulder blade and collar bone were crunchy, but that I needed some x-rays, but first “something to take care of that pain” and “oh stick some saline gauze of that nasty leg laceration.” The part I didn’t account for was the whole- let’s take of your kit before we get the IV in and the drugs flowing-t Sweet jumping Jehoshaphat that tingled. One curious memory was noticing that it was difficult getting my sleeve down my right arm because of the swelling. Bad omen there. I also remember then suggesting, after I was struggling. That they cut off my jersey and bibs- um no thanks ladies0 “ I responded, um these are rather expensive so I’d rather not.” Thank goodness I was wearing a full zip jersey- I can imagine how bad it would have been with a ¾ zip- it may have in fact required shears. I also recall how worried everyone was in order to not let me flash too much skin. Seriously folks- hospital ER, modesty has a place- but it isn’t here.
Oh well, they got me into a gown, popped an IV in me and started the itch inducing pain reducing drugs. Notice I didn’t call em painkillers; it would be a long time before I felt any sort of full on pain relief. As I was sitting there and nurses and orderlies were filing out. It seems like each one asked what happened to me, I began the process of telling how I was out for a ride and I slipped and went off the road. Curiously it seemed like everyone was under the impression that when I said I had a ‘bike’ crash that I went a motorbike not a bicycle. I forgot how many times I had to correct the listener- for me to change my retelling to explicitly include the words ‘bicycle training ride.’ I suppose the assumption of the motorcycle wreck was a nod to how uncommon and severe my injuries were.
After a short while letting the drugs kick in I was wheeled off to x-rays with a gregarious technician. As she told me, to hold still and try and move this way and that I could hear and feel Jackhammers at what felt like arm’s distance away. The tech. dismissed the jackhammers as part of some renovations going on nearby- and continued on with blessedly one-sided conversation.
Soon I was back in my room and I was told that I indeed had broken a few things the doc rattled down the list, Rib, Clavicle, oh and that Scapula is in several pieces- with that pronouncement – with a poof my season was gone- all of that training, those hellish intervals, my fitness I had gasped for, sweat gallons in Alabama heat for, burned my legs for, starved myself for, spent long weekends staring at empty stretches of road for, wrenched myself out of bed at ungodly hours for- gone in a pile of broken bones. Cyclocross was gone, road races were gone, what I think was the best cycling fitness of my life…gone.
Once I was done feeling sorry for myself they told me I was going to need an MRI- dollar signs flashed before my eyes- jinkies I thought, there goes the money I was going to use to finish up building my new cross frame and buy those tubular wheels I had already bought the rubber for- at least I pragmatically told myself- I wouldn’t need it this year anyway.
Then I discovered that the results of the MRI- would determine if I needed surgery on my shoulder- if the joint surface of my shoulder blade was involved I was headed to Huntsville because the Surgery was not something anyone here in Gadsden could do. A quick prayer at that point the Doctor told me that they were going to stitch me up and then take me off for the MRI- but first- she was passing me off to another Doctor, Dr. Hunt. It seems that my first Doc’s shift was over and I quote- “I value my personal time, time with family” etc- I bit business like, but as a child of a physician I understand the long hours and the time away from home- so Dr. Jones tapped out and into the ring hopped Dr. Hunt.
Dr. Hunt had the unenvious task of reconstructing the pile of meat that was my right leg. That’ s right, I busted up my left shoulder but cut the daylights out of my right leg. On what I cut it on we’ll never know. In a continuation of the unfamiliarity of most folks with road bikes etc. several folks assumed I must’ve been a pedal that opened the inverted v-shaped laceration- if someone can cut themselves that severely with a Speedplay pedal than they are doing something very wrong (Yes I realize that you could easily, and correctly argue that by overcooking a corner and shooting off through someone’s backyard on my road bike, at speed, then stacking it into the ground- I just may have been “doing it wrong” but let’s just ignore that detail) I just don’t see what it could have been that tore me open, I doubt it was the chain ring since I was in the big chain ring, so nothing sharp there, no blood on the bike, no grease on me- who knows.
Where were we- that’s right- home ec with Dr. Hunt. In a somewhat fortuitous moment, it has been asked of a somebody to set up a table with the necessary materials for sutures- the person who couldn’t see my wound, for it was obscured with some gauze- set up the fisher price- my first sutures kit. Dr. Hunt, sat down, pulled the instrument table over, uncovered my name and in voice, reminiscent of Brody’s famous line from Jaws- “We’re going to need a bigger boat” called for a more complete suture set up. Frankly I couldn’t feel the sutures, or even the needles going in numbing me up. All I could feel was tugging and it seemed to correlate with movements of the doctor’s hands. Carol had warned me a few minutes before that she couldn’t watch the stitches- something about it not being the blood and meat, but the fact that it was my blood and meat. It turns out once she took a peek she was fine- and she got great photos of the wound with her camera phone.
During the procedure C and I were talking and at some Musical reference DR. Hunt perked up- and we had a great conversation about some cool music- but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was about. He just ended up being a cool guy that sewed me up really well. At one point, he asked kind or rhetorically, how do you feel about scars? He explained that this was going to be q pretty good one.
To be continued…
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