Reasons for Thanks

I talked with the doctor today and my Fibula has healed well.  (with the help of a lot of screws) The Tibia is still awful looking, but I can now put full weight on the leg!  When looking at the X-rays, the doctor pointed out several pieces that he said he was literally putting and holding in place with his thumb during surgery.  There were so many splinters of bone it was a complete jigsaw puzzle.  Bleh.  It still looks pretty bad to me, but to the doctor, who honestly is the only one that knows what bad really looks like, it has healed enough for me to walk a couple of weeks in the boot without crutches.  After that, I'm free of all this.

Now that I'm limping around without the crutches, I'm thankful for several things, and I'm noticing more and more by the hour.  I imagine that I will continue to notice things that I can now do that I just couldn't a day ago.

First of all, I'm thankful for all the people that helped me through the worst of this mess.  Thanks to my friends who got me home from Montana, my wife who has since driven me everywhere for the past 9 weeks and has put up with my numerous lows in dealing with this.  I also need to give some thanks to the people at work that helped me get through the day when I couldn't carry anything.

Things that I am really happy about:

1. I can walk/limp without crutches.  (Now would be the time for one of those awesome pimp costume canes)

2. I can DRIVE again!  (I think that Brenna may be the one more thankful in this particular case.)  I might hug my Honda when I get home, but the 2 feet of pollen coating it would just make that idea gross.

3. I have been cleared to get back on my spin bike!!  While it's not riding through the trees on my favorite possessions, it's a major start down that trail.

4. I can carry my own coffee back to my desk at work without fear of wearing it or endangering others.  (one of those small yet oh-so-important elements of every day life)

5. I can walk down stairs instead of scooting down on my rear end.  (I won't feel like such an invalid but the kids won't like that I'm harder to catch and climb on.)

I'll stop now, but life is getting back to normal and I feel encouraged that I will be able to do something aside from sit by a pool when I head to the deserts of Nevada and Utah in 6 weeks.  Now I have to get stronger, drop some couch surfing weight, and get back to life as normal.

A comparison but not really...

A fellow co-worker was reading through this blog and compared me to Evel Knievel.  Heh Heh...

I enjoy fast paced and somewhat risky sports but I'm hardly a daredevil.  Just look at the Red Bull website or any number of GoPro videos if you want to see what I do NOT do.  Well, at least things I don't do anymore on the skydiving front...It's official though, I injured myself much less falling out of airplanes/helicopters than I have done in several other sports.  I only broke an arm in 10 years and 730 jumps back in my skydiving days.  Hence, Skydiving is way safer than wake boarding, road and mountain bike riding, ice skating (lame story), and skateboarding down stairs.

And NO there is absolutely nothing wrong with my statistical sampling there...so just take your mathematics degrees and stuff them.

In the humorous moment of thinking about the comparison of me to Mr. Knievel, I went to the one source that could give me some random trivia for the day.  Al Gore's interweb* thingy directed me to this other thingy called Wikipedia, which I guess is becoming the repository for all of human knowledge and will eventually become self aware like Skynet  and destroy us all... 


Back to my random trivia after a collection of tangents.  Sorry.

Evel Knievel broke a lot of bones...and by a lot I mean, “The 433 broken bones he suffered during his career earned an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records as the survivor of "most bones broken in a lifetime."[2]” Wikipedia: Evel Knievel

Holy Cow!  How did he even walk after his career was over...or did he?  In retrospect, I will probably break bones again since I don't really have an intention of quitting the sports I love, but I hope to hold out for at least a decade before the next skeletal catastrophe.  This current one sucks worse than any of my others.

I'll see a doc this week and see if I can actually walk without crutches anytime soon, and I'll badger him to let me on my spin bike.  I'll let you all know how it goes.

*No, Al Gore didn't actually claim to invent the Internet...He's just a typically self aggrandizing politician and not very good with phrasing in interviews during an election season.