My Motorcycle Injuries

I’d like to draw a bit of an analogy today as I watch the Red Sox beating the Twins by a fairly wide margin just now. The Sox have been in either first or second place all season long. Recently they have slipped into third place and they are playing with a level of inconsistency that has them looking like heroes one game and goats the next. It’s getting too late in the season for this, but it’s baseball and you never know… I’m hoping that this is a pattern that does not develop in my life when dealing with the aftereffects of my accident injuries. The past several months have had me going from feeling athletic and strong one week to then feeling like a beat-up guy who needs to rest for a while the next week. I get so tired of this pattern and at times it causes some frustration when thinking about the future. I don’t want my life to go in this type of direction, but the truth is that my body doesn’t care what I think lately. I’ve always said that you can’t give up hope with the Red S...

I have started to take care of my  2 ½ year old niece again after an eight week Summer break . Her mom's a teacher, and school has started again this week with the need for staff to report in and prepare for the kids to return on Monday. I take care of my niece for the better part of the work day from Monday through Friday. I must admit, as corny as it may sound, that I fall a little more in love with her each day. She has gotten more active with age, but she's a really good kid and doesn't challenge me with her behavior (much). Today I took her sixteen year old sister out for breakfast and a little shopping as an end of the Summer treat. We have always been close and I enjoyed spending a little bit of time with her this morning. I'm sitting here on my couch now while watching a Red Sox game and hoping that they don't embarass themselves the way they did last night in Toronto against the Blue Jays. YYYYeah... The reason that I'm sitting here (aside from the gam...

I don't believe that I live in a world where absolutely nobody can possibly understand what I go through from day to day with the physical and mental distractions that are caused by my accident injuries. I'm certain that there are plenty of people who understand exactly what I go through from day to day. It's just that I haven't really run into those people yet. I'm not all that complex of a person and the things that I go through aren't very deep in any way. It's just that the feelings that I experience, both physical and mental, are a part of me and no one that I have ever spoken to is even close to being in the "place" that I'm in.  Some folks can be extremely sympathetic. I can see it on their faces when I answer a question regarding my physical state and everything that happened to me in the accident. Other folks only seem to ask about my injuries in order to use them as a conversational springboard to talk about things that they have pers...

I was speaking to a guy at church who is about twenty years older than me. We were talking about various things and the topic of body pain came up. I told him what I was feeling at the time and he said somewhat lightheartedly, “yeah, that’s age”. He set my mind on overdrive with that statement. I’ll be 58 at the end of next month. With that said, I’m someone who remains fairly active physically. I exercise with weights and boxing equipment, walk several miles daily, and work with things around the house that involve a decent amount of physical effort. I remain in pretty good shape, although I am at a point in life where I can finish that statement with the words “for a guy my age”. Still...you know, active and all. When this guy made the lighthearted comment, I began to evaluate what’s going on with my body. So yeah, I admit freely that I’m not as young as I used to be and my body, by nature of the aging process, is not what it once was. But… it’s too big of a coincidence that the so...

My body continues to play tricks with me. For about a week and a half my hand was feeling some fairly intense sensations from all of the nerve damage. It varied from “pins and needles” type of stuff to some pretty uncomfortable pain. If that weren’t enough, I seem to be developing a trigger finger (stenosing tenosynovitis) with my index finger. Yeah, fun. I started to feel it about a month ago, but it’s gotten worse within the last two weeks. My original orthopedic surgeon had told me long ago that he did some work with a tendon (or tendons, I can’t remember which) during the original surgery in the hospital. Now it seems that something has gone wrong with a tendon in that same area of my hand. It doesn’t really hurt right now, but I know that it will get to a point where it's a hindrance to me. I know this because I had a trigger finger on the same hand's middle finger when I was younger and I wound up needing corrective surgery to get it fixed. At present time it isn’t worth ...

Tonight I had dinner with over a dozen family members at a burger restaurant nearby. We sat outside because of the size of our group and we had a nice time together. Our table was located about twenty feet from the entrance to the place where I got my haircut on the morning of the accident. The crash occurred as I rode home from getting a haircut at that place. I have absolutely no memory of the haircut or the ride to and from this place, but I’m a creature of habit so I know pretty much where I pulled in and where I parked. It is currently an empty storefront (thank you Covid-19) but the place looks the same as it did years ago. I sat in a chair at the dinner table tonight that had me facing directly toward the front entrance of the former storefront. It makes me feel stupid, but I kept thinking that this was the last place that I walked without having so many problems with my body. I knew where I would have gone between the front door and my bike in the parking lot, and I couldn’t ...

So yeah, the show must go on. I’ve mentioned before that my body is at a stage where things are getting worse little by little. It’s nothing dramatic or debilitating, but I notice the small increments of decline as time passes. My hip is hurting more whether I stand or sit, while the rest of my leg feels pain on and off. The pain in my hip sort of feels as though it’s being stabbed with something sharp inside, but at other times it feels as though it;s getting hot. Weird, yes? My thigh often feels pain along with my hip, but I was told that my femur grew into the muscle a little when it was healing, and the painful discomfort in my thigh continues to convince me that the orthopedic surgeon wasn’t lying. My knee is what it is, but I’ve honestly grown more accustomed to ignoring the way that it feels and the hindrances that it produces throughout any given day. I sometimes have a more difficult time standing up after sitting still for a longer period of time, and I really feel like limpi...