The Itinerant Cyclist

Now that I am permitted, by the orthopedic surgeon and The Wife, to ride on the trainer I am spending some time each day in the garage.  I am not a big fan of the trainer; if I cannot get out where the wind can blow through the helmet vents then I prefer to use the rollers.  But for now that is not an option.

The first task was figuring how to get on the bike, since I cannot just ‘throw’ a leg over the top tube.  The first couple of days were tricky, but I have picked up enough flexibility that I can stand on the left pedal and slip the right leg around the back and over the saddle to mount.  The first session was 15 minutes, and I was not sure I would last.  A lot of tightness and pain behind the right knee and some slight pain at the hip as the right knee is lifted in the stroke.  At first it was all sitting straight up, no bending forward.

I have increased the time on trainer by 5 minutes per session.   A couple more days and  I will hit the one hour mark.  Phew!  There is less pain now, and there is more flexibility each day.  I can now rest my hands on the top of the bars for the most part.  I am nowhere near ready to get to the hoods yet, much less the drops.  And I cannot stand and pedal.  Baby steps, but there are signs of progress.   One of the issues after reaching 30 minutes is that the neighbors do not provide sufficient entertainment to overcome the mind (and butt) numbing effects of the trainer.  I now use the iPod, but that might not be enough once I go past an hour.  Perhaps I will need to mount a TV on the garage wall(?).

The neighbor to our east has a large walnut tree in their side yard next to our property line. It provides some nice shade, but it is a pain and adds a lot of additional work for me. In the early winter I have to trim it back so it is not sitting on our roof or hanging too low over the side-yard. In the spring it flowers, pouring vast quantities of pollen into the air and triggering weeks of bad allergies for both The Wife and myself. Then all the flowers drop, creating a large mess to clean up, including out of the rain gutters which they tend to block. After that there is about three months in which the tree is a great neighbor.   The lasts until the walnuts are ripe adding another mess, and an infestation of small moths that seem to grow up in the walnut tree or walnuts. And finally in the fall we have all the leaves to deal with, and that includes more work on keeping the rain gutters clean.

The walnuts seem to be ‘ripe’ around late July into mid-August. We are near the end of that period now, a period when it is difficult to go into that side yard and during which we get pre-dawn wake up calls from those who feast on the bounty of the walnut tree. The Wife complains that the racket starts way too early most mornings these days. By 5:15 AM or so there may be 2, 3, or 4 squirrels in the tree cracking open walnuts right outside our bedroom window, and dropping quite a few on the roof. Soon the cacophony of Chickadees starts; they come to eat whatever insects are feeding on the tree or the nuts. Occasionally one of the neighborhood feral cats will come to try to get a squirrel, which leads to an all out symphony of warning notices. The pile of walnut shells grows on that side of the house until the weekly visit of the gardeners. By the time they got here last Saturday the debris was probably about a half-inch deep all along that side, making it difficult to get into the side entry into the garage.

Working from home this summer I have been witness to more of the action than normal. As I sit in the back office I can often see two or more squirrels running around the yard or cavorting in the privet trees. I see them digging a lot in the gardens and wonder how many volunteer walnut trees might spring up next year. I have not seen any walnut seedlings yet, but we do have three volunteer oak seedlings in the yard which I presume are the after-effect of squirrel nut hording behaviour.

The local squirrels have feasted so much for the past three weeks that they are looking a bit thick. Perhaps we need to add some exercise facilities. Or perhaps enjoy some squirrel fricassee with a nice salad garnished with walnut bits.

I had a visit with the orthopedic surgeon on Wednesday. It was time for her to review x-rays, see if things were healing, and to direct me on the road to recovery. It was time, also, for me and The Wife to ask questions.

• Can I drive? (yes)
• Can I ride on a stationary bike/trainer? (yes)
• When can I ride on the road? (2-4 months from now)
• When can we go on vacation? (after the next visit, in 2 months)

The latter question was important to The Wife. I threw her world into a tailspin. We were going along, living our lives, planning to spend some time in South America on mountain bikes this fall, and I go out and have an accident that negated all our plans for the rest of the year. And it forced her into the role of doing all the normal household stuff by herself for a while. It is time for payback, and that means taking her on a vacation where she can participate in some sports (snorkeling, some mellow surfing, etc.) and I can participate in a bit less.

Thursday I bought plane tickets. Then I rented a condo for 8 nights. All starting just 9 days after the next visit to the doctor. Time for some fun in the sun, a bit of salt water therapy, and some relaxation.

It is a good thing to get away alone this year. The Wife has promised her parents a vacation next year, a bicycle tour, for her mother’s 60th birthday. The current thought she is working on is a trip along La Route Vert in the french speaking part of Canada. Time to get out the French language movies and bone up on the language, I guess. The English language version of the guide to the Route Vert from Vélo Québec arrived on Wednesday and we are now looking and planning for next year, too. Plan, plan, plan … or is it dream, dream, dream?

Even though I am working from home, the boss has been cracking the whip so I have not been able to digress into working on other things.  At least for the most part.  I had thought I could use some of this time to do a complete redesign of this blog, but that is not going to happen.  I had wanted to for a while, but then got the swift kick in the behind when Sabine unveiled her sweet new site.  So, though I do not have the time to go full bore, I used Tuesday night (while The Wife was away) to slide in a new WordPress theme and dress it up a little.  Hey, this one even uses gravatars on the comment pages!  Still lame, but better.

With lots of time to think, rather than ride, work on the house, or work in the yard, lots of random stuff tends to zip around through the cerebral synapses. Of course the question remains how much will be remembered once the bones, tendons, ligaments, and skin have finished healing.

One thread in the milieu of thoughts has been of goals, short-term and long-term. The accident has had a great impact on many short-term goals and objectives. All remaining racing related goals for the year were immediately pushed into the mental bin marked ‘unattainable’, at least for this year. Who knows about next year. The Wife and I had a goal of doing some riding outside the US this year and had been planning on some MTB riding in South America to meet that goal. That, too, was swept into the ‘unattainable’ bin. Many more things will be pushed off this year’s calendar or seriously delayed. What comes back onto the calendar for next year remains to be seen and will be determined, in part, by how well the recovery is coming but also, in part, by considering and weighing the risk factors.

The long term goal thread has been dominated by concern about how accidents like this might impact what I want to do in the future. At some point in time, probably at the time I drop out of the day-to-day workforce, I want to take a few months and just meander across the country sampling a bit of the craziness that exists in this nation. Might want to try a couple of others, too. But to do so I must be healthy enough and able to physically stand the daily grind of pedaling many tens of miles. Got some other long term goals on the mind, too, and in general I need to be healthy to meet them.

So now I am sitting here with some work stuff cranking and waiting to finish so I am musing on how to balance staying active, doing what I would like to do, but staying healthy enough to continue to work towards what I want to achieve both now and down the (cronological) road. No answers at time, just part of what ye olde brain is trying to sort out at the moment.

Yesterday I admitted I was a luddite, at least in part.  This morning The Wife informed me that the ‘Gimp tag’ posted on my ‘wall’ on the social networking site by Sabine requires me to post 5 things about myself that are not commonly known.  Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.  Let’s see, in no particular order:

1)  I was awarded two Air Medals during the little confict in  Southeast Asia back in the early 70’s.

2) I have six siblings, four sisters and two brothers.  I am second in the pecking order with a sister two years my elder.

3) I survived malaria in the early 80’s, contracted while working in Peru as a field biologist.  While awaiting official diagnosis and treatment my fever cycles would peak at over 106 degrees F (BTW, at that time number one factor leading to death from malaria was inability of medical folks to properly diagnose; I knew what I had but the doctor did not want to believe and was chasing other exotic diseases).

4) I have walked away from two helicopter crashes, one in western Texas and the other on the side of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines.

5) My temporomandibular joints (both sides) are so loosely connected that I can disarticulate them at will.  Or more correctly, they disarticulate so freely that they do so unless I consciously work to keep them articulated.  If I do not control it, the joints will alternately disarticulate and rearticulate as I chew, each movement generating an associated loud popping sound.  Great party trick, but it freaks out a  lot of folks so I need to keep it under control.  The problem was caused when I was struck in the jaw by a shoulder during a football game ca. 1970.

Enough of  baring my soul for today.  I see Chris from Austin was just tagged on his blog and I will be interested to see what he divulges.

There was a group ride and BBQ on Sunday on the peninsula. And no one noticed until folks were going home that there had been an early fatality. The victim, a T. Squirrel, had been run over by the front tire of the car of one of the participants. It is unknown if T. Squirrel was an innocent victim or had committed suicide by placing themself in front of the car as it pulled into park.

A couple of weeks back we were at a 50th birthday celebration, just a few folks gathering in a backyard for some food, wine, and socializing. Listening to the conversation it became clear that I was probably the only person in the group that did not have a presence on either of the two major social networking sites. Someone working in tech being the luddite in a group that included building contractors, PR folks, and the like? I am 5 to 20-something years older than everyone else in attendance, but can I use age as an excuse?

Last week I did sign up on one of the sites, the one that seems less focused on the teenage crowd. Still find myself hesitant to go blasting everyone I know with invites to be friends. But at least it gave The Wife the opportunity to tag herself as married on the site.

This past Sunday evening we happened to catch the CBS network news.  In general I am not a big fan of CBS News these days; things have gone steadily downhill and I think the signal that they were really struggling was the annointment of the queen of fluff journalism as their regular weekday anchor.  But the TV was sitting on that channel when the news came on and one of the headlines caught my attention enough for me to keep the set and that station and watch for a while.

The story of interest was about the ‘new’ drug of choice for athletes who dope, with a slant towards the coming Olympics.  So what is this ‘new’ drug which led them to tack on the story to the national news?  EPO!  (of course we know they mean a synthetic form of EPO).  ‘EPO’ as a new drug?  Is CBS caught in some kind of time warp?  Do they forget that it was EPO that Bjarne admitted last year to having used in 1996, a full 12 years ago?  Or that EPO was front and center in 1998 in the ‘Festina scandal’?   Lots of other times it has made the news in the past 10+ years, so I am at a loss as to how CBS could think that this is a ‘new’ drug of choice.  Of course the story had to mention the failed test of this year’s Italian bad boy, Ricco.  The only thing of real interest in the story was that some researchers in Denmark claim that doping with low levels of synthetic EPO can have a physiological effect that lasts for a while but that any trace that could be tested will disappear rather quickly.  Almost a challenge to dopers to start trying mini-doses to amp up the hematocrit a bit and stay under the testing radar.

Wonder what the next major ‘news’ story they will hype more than a decade too late?

We watched the Michael Moore documentary on healthcare, Sicko, on Friday.  It was rather timely since the bills for my crash last month just started appearing in the mailbox.   Moore is always over the top, but he usually puts some light on the craziness in our society, and the healthcare industry in this country definitely is out of whack in many ways.

The first bill I have received is from the hospital for my treatment in the ER (but not for the trauma doctors, all billing separately), the operation (but not the surgeon), and my 61 +/- hour stay.   The total is tickling, hard, the six figure range and some of the charges seem a bit excessive.  The 30 min or less with PT on my second day, basically them watching me get up and hobble on a walker then crutches, comes in at a bit over $500.  The OT person who followed along but did not really do much other than say ‘good job’ is apparently worth almost $700.  The PT person the next day, the one who took me for one lap of the floor and a couple of steps, is charged at $600.   There is a full body CT scan at $25K, and a separate head CT scan at $5K.  Isn’t the head part of the body?  Couldn’t they do it all at once for one price?

The craziest part of it all is how the numbers change due to my insurance.  There is a ‘contractual adjustment’ to the near six figure price, an adjustment that deducts 80% of the price from the total, with the remainder being allocated to the insurance carrier and to me.   Which is a bit scary; if I am John Doe without insurance I would be on the hook for nearly $100K just for the hospital, but since I have insurance yours truly and the insurance company together only have to come up with 20% of that amount.  Now that is truly ‘Sicko’.   And it really points to the need for healthcare/insurance reform with universal coverage.