Originally posted by Parallax Glad it wasn't worse than it was, Gene.
Were you wearing a helmet?
Thanks, Jim. I was wearing a helmet on an easy bike path at about 2/3 of my usual cruising speed. I've taken some risky rides up and down the sides of mountains, but on a danger scale of 1 to 100 this was about a "3." I suppose we need some reminder sometimes about how every hour we get is a gift, because this was not on my radar of risk.
I actually have no memory of the accident itself or the injuries, but only reports from a friend who looked up and I was gone. I do not have memory until after I was moved from the ICU at the trauma unit at University Hospital. The broken ribs and clavicle are reminders now, but it is probably a good thing that I am spared the memory of whatever deflated my left lung and caused whatever injury to my u.t. that required the ER/EMT folks to install a catheter of a size that might have worked for a farm animal. That's still a big OUCH.
On the good side, everyone from the surgeons, to the nurses to the physical therapists remarked on what good physical shape I'm in, and how amazed they were at my progress getting up and around with these injuries. I won't be getting back in shape with bike rides for a while. My lovely insurer is actually going to fight the University Hospital because they have now decided that I recovered so well from a life-threatening set of injuries, that perhaps the hospital could have turned me out a couple of days earlier. Look, a really bad day at home is 10 times better than a really good day at the hospital, so I would have been all for cutting a few days off my sentence, but there were quite a few injuries that needed to stabilize. I'm going to find out how to make a donation to the hospital even if the insurer does not pay everything.
Further on the great side, I found I had friends all over. I got flowers from people I'd never expected (like some lawyers with whom I'd just had testy depositions), discovered that I really like all those healthy vegetables that they remove from hospital food, and found out that even the word "love" seems inadequate to describe my wife's care and support.