My Motorcycle Injuries

 Today is the last day of my “full time” duty with my niece. I’ve taken care of her Monday thru Friday, early morning until late afternoon, since she was six weeks old. She is now four, and will begin attending pre-k in the late summer. Her mom is a teacher and school ends for her today, so my time with my niece will now be far more limited. I’ll get her for a couple of weeks in August as her mom reports for staff days, and then she’ll begin attending school later in the month. From then on I’ll only be taking care of her on school half-days and teacher work days (along with any sick days). All in all it will only add up to a few days each school year. I’ve spent the past four years watching her grow up while joining her in playing with a multitude of different toys, playing every game that she learned or made up, walking her around my neighborhood, watching her play with my tools in the driveway, taking her to various places as a sort of field trip, playing various chase games a...

  I have a CT scan done of my chest once a year. It's ordered by my cardiologist so that he can see if the stent in my aorta is either leaking or has moved. The stent was placed there because of a force of impact rupture that occured during the motorcycle accident. I went for the scan this year after a bit of a struggle with my new insurance company, and I recieved a call from the cardiologist's office a few days later telling me that everything was peachy keen with my aorta.They usually schedule an appointment for me to see the doctor after the scan for the sake of an examination that includes an EKG but...they made no mention of an appointment, and here I am a couple of weeks later and they haven't called me.  I, uh, haven't called them yet and I'm pretty certain that it won't be happening. I hate going to doctor's appointments, and I'm thinking that I'd rather just skip this one. I've been told every year since the accident that I have a healt...

I’m not taking care of my niece this week because her mom is a teacher and the school in which she teaches is on spring break. Today I spent most of the morning working on a sermon for this coming Sunday and I spent part of the afternoon trimming a tree at the church property. My wife and my daughter are both home with me this week so I’ve been able to be with them throughout most of the day. Why do I share the minutiae of my day with you here? Because of this…earlier this afternoon I had to deal with an insurance issue concerning a CT scan that I’m supposed to have already taken. I ended up having to cancel the procedure until my insurance company gives the final OK within a few days from now. The need for the scan relates to a stent in my aorta near the heart that was placed there nine years ago because of a rupture caused by the force of impact in my accident. Am I sounding more exciting? I thought not. My point in typing this blog entry has to do with a quick thought and it’s thi...

Things have been a little demanding lately between taking care of my niece (4 years old, happy, energetic, and of the belief that I am able and willing to do anything imaginable), maintaining my house, and my regular duties within the ministry. Additionally, the folks who ordinarily do a lot of the maintenance work on the church property haven’t been well, so I’ve been covering things such as cleaning the main building and some of the landscaping work. There are days when I feel so beat up that I just want to sit and stare. The parts of my body affected by the motorcycle accident keep me feeling as though I’m wearing down like an overused gear that’s slowly running out of grease. My hand takes a few minutes to operate normally when I first wake up, while the rest of the day is spent with the need to tolerate everything else that my hand feels like, well, feeling. My leg is constantly in need of “warming up” for the sake of walking when I first stand after having been seated for more th...

If you read from my first blog entry forward, you can see a progression that vacillates from better to worse to better, etc.  My problem these days with the aftereffects of the motorcycle injuries lies with the fact that things don’t seem to be getting better anymore. My hip, thigh, knee, and shin are in a perpetual state of despair. The pain and discomfort are never anything that I would call severe by any measure, but things do vary between being an annoyance and actually being a hindrance. I don’t like the idea of taking pain meds, so yeah, life is a daily party of erratic discomfort. My arm has decided to join the party lately by providing a fairly pronounced pain throughout the forearm, with my guess being that it is related to the tendon damage done by the broken radius bone that has caused a great deal of trouble since the accident. I guess that my point is this; putting up with so many injuries inflicted upon your body at one time can take you beyond any feeling of invincib...

One of the things about dealing with all of the injuries that were caused by the motorcycle accident involves the constant assessment that I have to make concerning the pains and limitations that I endure. I have had to experience an evolution physically throughout the past years as my body has continued to change in how it hurts and how it functions. This past Sunday I hit my (bad) knee on a piano bench at the church as I walked past it while cleaning a few things. It was a very light and trivial thump with the bench, but the wood-to-leg contact centered just where the end of the screws that hold together my tibia at the side of my knee are located, and it hurt in a big way. After a few seconds I grew accustomed to what I was feeling and I continued to get things ready to leave the building, but the pain uncharacteristically remained throughout the day. It’s Monday evening as I type this entry and the pain remains still, but I’m certain that it will go away within another day or two...

I went to sleep last night at 11 o'clock. Not too early, not too late. I woke up at 2 o'clock in the morning. I remained in bed, wide awake, until 4 a.m. I then got up to watch a little tv until about 5 a.m., and then I went back to bed and stayed there until about 6:30. I then got up for the day and started to work on everything that needed to be ready for my niece's arrival later in the morning. It's all a little brutal, but it's part of the price paid for riding my bike to get a haircut nine years ago. I was in the hospital from late November until mid-January. I couldn't sleep in the hospital at all, and I really didn't do any better after I finally made it back home. My thought back then was that I would eventually resume a normal sleep pattern after my leg healed and I could lay in bed more normally. Sadly, time has proven me wrong. Every 2-4 weeks my body breaks down and I sleep better hours for one or two nights in a row, but my normal pattern invo...