Injury! (Sucks)

So you may have noticed that things have been a bit quiet here for the past couples of days. I have to say that it is tough to blog when you don’t have all of your limbs in full working order. It is pretty eye-opening how in a split second you can find yourself flying through the air and end up with a dramatic change to how you live your day to day life.

Last Thursday I was out on a mountain bike ride and had an unexpected surprise:  I was cruising along a nice single track, one that I have been on many times before, having a great time when suddenly I hear my front suspension bottom out.  Before I have time to even look down I am going over the handle bars.  My left shoulder and then the left side of my head plowed into the trail while my right foot is still clipped into the bike.  As I work my foot free I find myself sitting on the trail and I am in a whole lot of pain. My left shoulder felt like it was on fire and my head was throbbing with pain.  I sit for a few minutes trying to take inventory of my injuries. My left shoulder hurts every time I tried to move it around but at least I could get some movement. I felt around the bones, comparing it to my right side as I move my shoulder around but I couldn’t feel anything too hideous like a bone poking through the skin.

Next I move to inspect my head.  I unfasten my helmet and take a look at it.  The first thing I notice is that the yellow parts of my helmet appear to be vibrating.  My vision was distorted and that worried me. As I continued with an inspection of the helmet, I couldn’t detect any breaks or cracks in it.  While I hit my head pretty hard at least it had been on dirt and not asphalt.  

While I think I am overall “okay”, I am concerned about the hit to my head.  At that point, I decide to call my wife to let her know I just got into a crash and hit my head.  (I figure it is best that someone knows what is going on in case I run into trouble coming back home.)  I can tell my call has her shaken; I am usually pretty macho when it comes to injury and I have come home bloody from crashes before without ever calling her. As I call her we arrange for her to pick me up in old Folsom a relatively short distance from where I was.  She mentions that I should call Rob, from Body Concepts, to let him know what is going on in case she can’t make it in a timely manner or I run into further trouble.  I call Rob and he suggests that when I get up to Old Folsom that I swing by his office and have him check me out to see what kind of damage we are dealing with.

As I start riding back my shoulder appears to be worse than I initially thought:  I can stay in a biking position without pain just fine however it can’t handle rough terrain or me pulling on the bars as I apply power to the pedals.  It takes me a while to make it off of the single track but I finally make it to the smooth, paved, bike trail.  From there, the rest of the ride is easy.  I almost feel like an accident never happened until I have to stop and get off the bike and my adrenalin stops flowing.  As I get off the bike I can feel a lot of pain in the shoulder again and it is difficult to raise my arm in any direction and it cannot bear any weight at all.

Just a few holes and dirt hide
what is really underneath.

As I get inside Body Concepts, Rob has me lay on one of his tables and then he starts doing all sorts of checks (poking around the shoulder joints, checking my vision and cognitive abilities). He finds a dent in my helmet that I had earlier missed and shows it to my wife. He talks about watching me to make sure I am talking and acting coherently. She hides her concern over my head impact by cracking a joke about not knowing whether or not I am making sense when I talk as I don’t usually anyway.

Rob places an ice pack on my shoulder and lets me rest for about 20 minutes while my wife takes the kids to get some lunch. When it is time to go my wife loads up my bike into the van – she was very proud of herself that she was able to get the front wheel off herself- and we head for home.

Luckily Jax fell asleep on the way home so my wife laid him down for a nap while she helped me take off my jersey. She exclaimed in surprise as she saw what was hidden beneath my jersey. My shoulder was chewed up and bloody and my whole back was covered in dirt and small bits of gravel. Rob’s checks were based on if there was any bone, muscle, or ligament damage.  With the shoulder part of my jersey intact, we didn’t really look underneath it.

I had bad road rash on the top of my shoulder along with some heavy bruising starting to come in.  Somehow tons of dirt and tiny rocks had been ground through the fabric of my jersey and into my skin. It took my wife a long time to carefully clean the wound the way Rob had taught us in the last class we took from him on cycling injuries. (Oh, the irony…) Getting it cleaned out was torture but Rob had made it very clear that it was important to get the wound as clean as possible to prevent infection.

It was a long process and my wife wanted to get ice back on my shoulder as soon as we were finished. She was getting concerned about the large purple, crescent shaped bruise that was developing around the shoulder joint. She soon had three bags of frozen veggies (two on my shoulder and one on a bruised area on my lower back) packed on me, some Advil in me and enough bandaging on me to second as a Halloween mummy costume.

So there I was; in just a single afternoon I went from the strongest, most able-bodied member of the family to someone who needs help carrying things, unable to hold my son or even drive. I wasn’t even able to dress myself and any movement of my left arm was downright scary. Not a position I am used to being in. So much more of the burden has fallen to my wife, she cares for our little one all day and usually I give her a break in the evenings when I get home. Now not only is she taking care of Jax but of me as well. I had better heal fast before my limitations drive me nuts. 

(To Be Continued in Part Two: Recovery)