Aw, faq.

Well, no thanks to YOU smartassed bastiches (well, aside from making me laugh) I done gone and edited my FAQ.  Let me know if you think I made it even worse.

And keep the smartassed questions comin’.  Dys is still trying to think up her most devastatingly clever one…

Get the gloves on!

Oh yeah.  Itches will be scratched.

This weekend heralds the return of motorcycle racing season, as the World Superbike paddock takes to one of my favorite tracks on Earth, Phillip Island in Australia.  (Click here for an onboard lap!)

I have to wait a few more weeks until April 11 for the MotoGP season to start, but just seeing wheels turned in anger will bring a smile to my face. (In the meantime, I have a few more weeks to contemplate my Season Preview for the 2010 GP season, eh?)

Clueless?  Try my motorcycle racing primer.  Ask all the questions you want.  And ladies might want to check out Dys’s reasons for watching the GP’s…

Give it a try…unlike NASCAR, it’ll all be over in an hour whether you like it or not.

Let’s burn some rubber!

Everybody’s got an opinion.

Pregunta:  What should I add/subtract to my FAQ?

I’ve decided it’s pretty old and boring-looking and I’d like to tweak it a bit, but before I do so I thought I’d throw it out there and see if there’s anything glaring that I’m missing, anything you think should go there, or just anything you’ve been curious about.  Even if it doesn’t make the frequently asked questions, fire away and you’ll probably get an answer.

What say ye?

For the ladies

I’m doing you all a favor.

Trust me.  It’ll only take a second.

All that for…

The last few Cub Scout meetings were snowed out, and last night was scheduled to be the Pinewood Derby race.  That’s why I was finishing the car up this weekend when I mangled myself, after all.

The scout leaders nicely decided to give us one extra week of practice.  I just didn’t find out until I got there last night.  So hell, I had a whole extra week after all.  Bummer.

Oh well – I learned a few extra tricks of the trade, and Boy’s car is still 0.4 ounces light, so I get a week to buff his axles with the Dremel and tape a quarter and a penny to it to bring it right up to 5.0.  From the looks of it, we’ll need it.  Some of those kids’ cars last night were haulin’.

And that’s about all I have to say for today.  I already spent most of my writing energy in spewing venom (or, as the writers of the Thor comics would say, venting my Righteous Anger) on Crisitunity’s behalf.  Y’all can go over there and get as pissed off as I was.  My blood pressure will settle down in another half-hour or so.

Can-do!

Here are some of the things I’ve learned in the past 72 hours.

Things I Can’t Do With My Cast

• Wash my right arm
• Put soap on a washcloth (good thing I had that Axe shower gel)
• Wash dishes
• Operate the windshield wipers on my car worth a shit
• Play Xbox
• Play guitar
• Make a decent sandwich (I can do it, but it’s a lot more difficult than you might think, and I end up doing a shitty job, so Dys has taken over lunch duty)
• Eat anything that requires cutting with knife and fork (no steak dinner for me on my bday weekend!)
• Pour muffin batter into the muffin pan
• Work out
• Lift boxes at work
• Change my earrings
• Wear anything with long sleeves terminating in cuffs (which limits my coat options)

Things I Can Still Do

• Shower
• Feed myself
• Drive
• Wash my right armpit (can get that part, at least.  My coworkers are surely relieved.)
• Go to the bathroom unassisted
• Do laundry
• Go grocery shopping
• Get dressed
• Tie my shoes (that one pleasantly surprised me)
• Shave (though it’s harder and takes longer, so I’m doing it at night in the sink instead of in the morning in the shower
• Tell the injury story over…and over…and over…  (I appreciate the sympathy, but dang, the story’s old already.)
• Type – woohoo!

Monday Music

Well, the good news is that my hand already feels better.  I keep it held up a little bit, since it swells & throbs if I leave it down for a while, but it feels better than yesterday.

Typing is an adventure, since I can’t bend my wrist, can’t really bend my fingers well at the knuckles, and so I type with my left elbow cocked up about 6-8 inches (and still my wrapped-up thumb often hits the spacebar by accident).  But hey, it is what it is.

I thought about looking up something funny for MM today like “Torn” or “Broken” but since I couldn’t find anything specific  to “lacerated thumb” I decided to go another route.  (You songwriters out there can let me know when you’ve closed that gap.)

This one is thanks to Crisitunity, who introduced me to Radiohead over the holiday.  This was my favorite tune of the bunch, though she’s right, it is not NEARLY the same without headphones to pick out all the stereo effects.  This song is one of the best uses of what they call “the studio as instrument” that I’ve ever heard.

Radiohead, “Subterranean Homesick Alien”

Thumbs up!

And it started off as such a nice day, too.

February tends to be a bitch for us.  Aside from the Big One I just posted about, there have been other emergency surgeries, injuries, etc that happen to fall right around my birthday.  Hell, even the worst point of our almost-divorce a few years back – right in that strike zone.  So this year, we were celebrating having made it thru my bday for a change.

Irony is a cruel, cruel bitch.

Yesterday morning I got up fairly early, fixed Boy and I some breakfast, and left Dys sleeping (she’d been up ridiculously late) as I took Boy first to Wal-Mart, then to the Boy Scout shop.  At WM, we bought paint and sandpaper for his Pinewood Derby car (he chose an amber-ish color) and, as a bonus, a red t-shirt with a dragon on it.  I was happy because I so rarely get to buy him things – it was kind of a treat for me.

We made the half-hour crosstown trip to the Scout Shop to pick up weights for the Pinewood Derby car.  When we got there, I pointed out to him the RIDICULOUSLY long icicles hanging at the hip joints of the shop’s copper roof.  These things were literally 2-3 feet long.  We went inside, and the place was a zoo.  I gravitated to the Derby car section, and just as I reached out to grab a set of weights (the undercar type, that come in a scored trapezoid so you can break off the right amount to meet the correct 5-oz weight limit) when another dad reached out and nabbed the last one.  D’oh!  There was a little set of adhesive coin pockets there…add a quarter here, a dime there, to make the weight.  Well, it was all I had to choose from, and the race itself was supposed to be on Tuesday.  (I think – the last two meetings were snowed out, so there’s still a chance they’ll postpone it, I guess.)

While waiting in the LONG line, we ended up right behind the weight-nabbing dad.  At one point, after talking (very nicely) with his kids, he spotted me holding the coin pouches, and said, “Did you need weights, too?”  “Actually, yes I did,” I replied.  He held one up – he had two.  “Here, take this one.  If one isn’t enough for us, I’ll use a washer for the other weight.”  I thanked him kindly, and we were outta there and headed back home. stopping off to fill up our near-empty tank of gas.  We got back about 11:30.

Dys had said she’d be up when we got back, to which Boy and I both scoffed.  When she’s up that late, normally the butt-crack of noon is about her wake-up time.  I figured I’d give her a little longer before waking her up to play Rock Band.  If we were to get Boy’s car done and painted up, I needed to get to work, so before lunch I decided to haul out my X-Acto knives, sit down outside on my back stoop, and carve the channel underneath his car to place the weights.

See, some of you are already starting to cringe.  I got about 1/3 of the way through, doing a good job even though I was thinking how easy it would be to hurt myself badly…before I, you know, hurt myself badly.   (At this point, people with weak stomachs can turn away for a few.)

The chisel blade I was using slipped and I hit myself on the left thumb, on the top of the middle joint.  Hard.  I instinctively grabbed the cut and applied pressure.  I waited a sec, moved my other hand to look, and WAY more skin moved than should have.

Confession:  I am one of those people above who have weak stomachs.  Honestly, I’m a big fat wuss.  It kept me from pursuing a career as a surgeon even though my high school chemistry teacher literally BEGGED me to do so.  “You’re great at the science, and you’ve got the steadiest hands I’ve ever seen – much better than (prominent local surgeon)!!”  Yeah, Mr. G, but the blood?  I can clean fish and field-dress game all day long, but when it’s a real-life person I go all woozy.  Dys laughs at me when she flips it to medical documentaries.  I damn near passed out during the video of a c-section during our Lamaze classes, and I wasn’t even looking right at it.

I’ve cut myself before that my mom has put butterfly tape over it and later said, “We really should have gotten you stitches.”  Actually, though, I’ve had stitches twice in my life:  once when I had my wisdom teeth out when I was 16, and the other when I broke a piece of glass and got some in my hand when I was two.  This time, I was pretty sure the butterfly tape wasn’t going to cut it.  Still keeping pressure on with my right hand, I walked in the house, back to my bedroom, and told Dys, “Babe, I need you to wake up.  Now.  I need you to drive me to the ER to get some stitches.”  Well, THAT got her attention.

As she went to get dressed, I went back to the kitchen and held my hand over the sink.  I got the instinct to peek again.  “Maybe the butterfly tape…”   NOPE.  Not only that, but now I was officially feeling faint.  I decided the best thing to do was to go sit on the back porch again where I could put my head low and not bleed all over the house.  Now here’s Funny Part #1:  While I’m sitting there, pale and sweating and clutching my hand (the pressure is keeping it from bleeding too much)…one of my neighbors that I don’t know well comes up and starts to have a conversation with me about my late beloved next-door neighbor.  She wanted to say that she and several of the other neighbors had noticed Dys and I trimming her bushes, raking her leaves, and shoveling her driveway, and wanted both to thank us and let us know that they’d told the family that we’d done so.  I was trying to be polite, thinking this would be a short talk and not wanting to alarm anybody, but she kept talking and I kept reeling until she asked if I was okay, and I said, “Actually, I’ve cut myself and I’m waiting for my wife to get ready to take me to get stitches.”  Neighbor went into overdrive.  “Oh my!  Do you need me to drive you?  Stay with the kids?  Anything!”  Heh.  I assured her we were okay, and she worriedly left, asking me to call if we needed anything.

Dys still wasn’t ready…she was getting dressed, calling the immediate care center to see if they were open (they were), talking to Boy, etc.  We decided NOT to force Boy to sit in  a waiting room, for all our sakes.  He could stay home safely, playing video games, and Dys’s parents agreed to call him every 30 minutes or so and talk to him for a while at a stretch.  Not knowing how long we’d be waiting, I came back in to grab a book, and on second thought, a can of Coke to get some sugar in my faint stomach.  Dys wrapped my thumb in a piece of and old towel and taped it up securely, then she had me go sit in the car while she took the dog out to pee and then we left for the immediate care center at about 12:30.  I told Dys she could just drop me off and I’d call her when I was done, but she shrugged me off.

Luckily for us, the ICC wasn’t terribly busy.  (We missed the Sat night rush, I guess.)  We (mostly D) filled out my paperwork, and soon thereafter we got called back.  I explained that I had an L-shaped laceration on my thumb, pretty deep although not sure HOW deep, because I told her up front, “YOU can look all you want, but I’M not gonna.”  Dys says, “I’m gonna look.”  I said, “Oh, so THAT’S why you wanted to stay!”  The NP looked nervous.  “Well,” she said, “I can see the bone.  I’m worried you might have ligament damage.  I could suture you, but I would recommend that you go to the ER at the hand care center downtown.  We accepted her advice, and I went ahead and got my tetanus shot there. The doc wrapped up my thumb (way too loosely, D snagged the tape after she walked out and did a much better job) and we left.

It was after 1 and neither of us had eaten – and with me feeling pretty faint, we decided to get some food.  I only thought afterward “that might have been dumb,” but D said she’d thought of it and was sure they’d only do a local on me.  Anyway, we hit a drive-thru and went to the hand care ED.  Luckily, as a specialty emergency dept, they also weren’t too busy, so we got right in.  All things considered, I was in a decent mood.  I felt better having eaten, and my normal defense mechanism of rapid-fire jokes was in full gear.  A resident took a quick look, I got some x-rays taken to survey any bone damage, then the resident numbed me up pretty good with a digital block.  Then a fellow came in and she and the resident spent probably 15 minutes digging around, pushing my thumb in all directions, and even comparing it to my right thumb.  “See?  This one doesn’t move that much.  There’s ligament damage there.”  Looking at the X-ray, they even thought they saw a spot where I shaved the knuckle slightly flat on one side.  Bonus.  I said, “Hey, I’m a bad musician, but I’d really like to not be any worse.”  They reassured me that I’d be cool.

They left to get things set up to operate on me.  Dys took this opportunity to try to talk me into letting her take pics of the cut with her cell phone.  At first I said NO WAY, but I gave in.  She didn’t get the good shots of the ladies holding everything open and poking around, but if anybody wants to see what color my blood is, drop her a line.  She then hushed me for a minute so she could overhear the fellow discussing my case with the senior attending, then shortly thereafter they took me back and set me up to operate.

I found myself wishing for my iPod.  They hung a little curtain so I couldn’t see what they were doing and so didn’t have to make sure I was looking away all the time, but still, something to focus on would have been good.  The nurse set me up with a tourniquet on my bicep, over my pushed-up sleeve of my sweatshirt.  She had to go back and get a bigger one, which I chose to take as “Yeah, these are the big guns, baby!” and not “I’ve got fat-dude arms.”  The fellow came in, and told me that the tourniquet would probably be the most uncomfortable part of the whole experience.  They got all their prep work done, balled up a little gauze for me to cup in my relaxed hand, inflated the tourniquet, and got to work.

She was right.  That tourniquet was TIGHT.  First my hand and arm went cold, then it went numb, and soon thereafter I lost all control over it whatsoever.  At one point the fellow said, “Relax it.”  I said, “Uh, I’ve got zero control over it right now!”  She laughed and said she meant the nurse.  I don’t know about you guys, but to me, I like it when the docs working on you are making small talk while they’re working.  To me, that means “routine.  We can do this.  No biggie.”  I’m lucky enough to live in a city where they’ve actually done a successful hand transplant. The fellow working on me?  Yeah, she studies with those dudes.  Compared to that, my repair was no big deal.

So, after digging around in there and surveying the damage closely, she says, “Well, the good news is, we can absolutely fix everything.  The bad news is, you won’t be playing your guitar for quite a while.  You’re pretty good:  you cut this one tendon about 95% of the way through.  You got this ligament over here as well – lacerated it, and actually took a tiny chunk out of it – but that should heal up just fine.”  She looked at the bone, and looked at it, and looked at it, and said, “Are you sure you’ve never injured this thumb before?”  “Nope.  Never.  I can’t think of any…WAIT.  Yep, that’s the thumb I hit with a hammer when I was 12 or 13.”  “Well, that flattened spot on the x-ray was probably caused by that.  You probably had a tiny fracture and it healed that way.”  She looked.  “Ah.  Yes.  But THIS is fresh.  Yep.  You took a tiny chip out of the bone, too.  Those X-Acto knives are pretty unforgiving.  If they’ll shave wood, they’ll shave your bones just fine.”  She paused.  “At least you put the laceration right on top where it’s easiest for us to get to.”  “Well, you know, Doc,” I says, “I wanted to keep you guys from being bored on a Saturday, but not have to work too hard.”

Well, score one for me.

They worked on me for probably an hour or close to it.  At one point, she said “Your tendon and ligament are all repaired, we just have to irrigate it and then sew up the skin and then we can let the tourniquet down.  Can you make it?”  I said, “Sure, I’m uncomfortable but I’ll make it.”  Well, the last 10 minutes with the tourniquet I was seriously uncomfortable.  Not only was all feeling gone, but it got to the point that even though I knew my arm was straight on the table, I could have sworn that it was bent 90 degrees at the elbow.  I started squirming a little bit, and just when I was about to ask “Uh, how much longer?” they were done.  The first let-off of the tourniquet felt great – a rush of warmth – then pins and needles to beat the band, but in a weird way, that felt good.  Then I swear it felt like not only did I have no control over my arm…still…but it felt like it was LOCKED in position.  I actually told the doc, “Wonder if this is what rigor mortis feels like?”

She started explaining to me that she’d be splinting up my thumb.  I’d just been thinking about the stitches, but oh, sure.  A splint.  Then she started talking about keeping the plaster dry.  I said, “Oh, a cast?”  “No, a cast goes all the way around.  This will only cup it.”  Ah.  But then she started laying out the plaster strips…the length of my entire forearm.  At that point, I just started to giggle.  We had officially crossed over into ludicrous territory.  So now I’m in a half-cast to my elbow for 2 weeks – and looking at some serious physical therapy after that.  I hope y’all liked my techno music, because that’s all I’m doing for a while.  (Hell, for at least 2 weeks I can’t even play Xbox.  Head to the library, check!)

Ah, February.  You dirty bitch.  Thanks for the badass birthday, at least.  Thumbs up!!

For the medically literate:

Left thumb extensor pollicis longus 95% laceration
Left thumb open proximal phalanx fracture
Left thumb ulnar collateral ligament of MPJ partial laceration

Pals, II

As I said this morning on Twitter, I thought my friends rocked BEFORE I got home from the gym, got out of the shower, and my wife buried me in a stack of birthday cards.

Now I’m sitting at my desk listening to an obscure metal band from Portland, there are two hockey pucks on the bookshelf in my office next to my toy motorcycles and pictures of Boy (and I quote, “What would a good Southern boy never buy for himself?  I know!  Hockey pucks!”), and I have a big stack of some of the funniest damned cards I ever read.  I couldn’t begin to list one without listing them ALL, (Yes, Heather and Kim, yours made it in time!) and I would surely mangle the language and this post would be forty pages long.  But trust me, I laughed my butt off at every one of ’em.

Add that to a stack of cash from family, the Scrubs and Big Bang Theory and the badass pair of studio-monitor headphones from Dys, the Marvel:  Ultimate Alliance 2 from Boy, and the promise from my in-laws to order the drum emulation software I’ve been lusting after…

Dys pulled it off.  She said she knew I’d had a long series of shitty birthdays recently (uh, see recent post for documentation now that my birthday is out of the bag) and she wanted to make up for it.  She said, “You’re loved, baby.  And not just by me!”

And yep, I felt it.  I sat there, surrounded by cards, sipping a celebratory Maker’s, playing my guitar, and watching ST:TNG (Crisitunity:  it was “The First Duty”) I knew I’d had the best birthday in at least a solid decade.  The best one I can remember in a long, long time.

Thanks to everyone, especially my lovely wife for pulling it all together.  You’re all the best.

A Sad Note

There was a soft knock on our door last night, and we opened it to find two of our neighbors, nicely dressed.

They’d come from the visitation of our next door neighbor, who had passed away on Saturday.

We hadn’t known, but we’d suspected.  She’d had cancer, and we’d not seen her or her family’s cars in some time, so we thought perhaps she was staying with her daughter or in managed care, but we hadn’t heard anything specific.  Until last night.

She was a sweet old lady, and ever since we moved in eight years ago she’d never been anything but an angel to us.  She was as good a neighbor as anyone could ask for.  I’ll miss pulling up after work in the summertime and seeing her leaned over in her gardening gloves, trimming her vines (and sometimes ours too, just because she was there anyway), and talking to her for a few minutes about nothing in particular at all.

I’ll especially miss her in the spring when her tulips and roses bloom.

Rest in peace, Carole.