Skip to main content

Bike Accident

Monday morning found me in the dentist's chair for the fourth time this year. "You look like one of those Tour de France guys," said Dr. Michelangelo. It wasn't a compliment on my cycling ability.

The day before, I was riding my bike and went to enter the driveway of the grocery store. The next thing I knew, my face hit the pavement. I'm still wearing cement in a few of my teeth. A little girl and her father asked me if I was OK. We talked for a moment, and the little girl said, "Just walk your bike home. I fall down on my bike all the time, and that's what I do." I took her advice.

I have a minor radial fracture in my arm and a fractured tooth. The arm should heal in a few weeks. Meantime, friends and neighbors are opening cans, bringing me things I need, and offering to water the yard. Strangers helped me pull a movie out of the Redbox machine and open a bottle of children's Alleve. A cosmetology student washed my hair, which wasn't damaged in the accident. I've been applying coconut oil to my scrapes and rinsing my mouth with it to prevent infection. (See this and this.) The thing that has hurt most has actually been the tetanus shot.
Even an explosion couldn't damage Mello's awesome hair.(1)
I was worried that the orthopedic doctor was going to take a dozen x-rays, run a lot of tests, and prescribe extensive surgery. When I saw him today, he shook my fingers, and having already looked at the x-ray I brought from the urgent care center, said, "You fave a minor radial fracture. It should heal quickly. Come back and see me in two weeks." He explained a little more and got rid of my splint, but that was about it.

My teeth are the bigger problem. The fractured one can't be salvaged, but the other two beside it that were knocked loose just need to heal and have some orthodontic work. The displacement of the canine keeps me from being able to chew, so I've been eating sanguinacchio and bone marrow tomato soup. (Imagine an angry chef wielding a big knife--that was like me chopping vegetables.) I find I prefer the sanguinacchio as a warm pudding, without the xanthan gum. On the menu: LC, non-dairy, alcohol-free eggnog, pate, and egg drop soup from the Chinese restaurant nearby.

More bike riding is not on the menu. My father didn't offer any advice, but he said I was lucky. I could have had a head or neck injury, or lost a bunch of teeth. The joy of tooling around on a bike isn't worth it. What's surprising is that almost everyone thinks I ought to get back on. Avoiding a death trap that I don't need to be on seems like common sense to me, but maybe Judge Judy can explain the idea better than I can.

When I was four years old, I was enrolled at Miss Noddidge's Dancing School....I participated in all the exercises and classes. I studied ballet, tap, and acrobatics--and I didn't exactly fly through the air with the greatest of ease. After one fairly  severe injury--caused by a failed double back flip--I was excused from dancing classes until I could bring a note from the doctor. My parents were smart enough to realize that maybe dance and acrobatics weren't for me. So I was allowed gracefully to withdraw--until then the most graceful thing I'd ever done--from Miss Noddidge's Dancing School. Until I could walk again, anyway.
***
Failure doesn't build character. Success builds character. Whoever said, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" warped the minds of several generations of parents. People think that their children learn important lessons from failure. I believe a child can learn more in a moment of success than can ever be learned in a month of failures.(2)

I'll stick to walking and driving. I don't need another humbling experience of being unable to bike down the street without a disaster.

Sources:

1. Picture: http://witegots.deviantart.com/art/251-Death-Note-Matt-Speaks-71518083
2. Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever by Judge Judy Scheindlin. Harper Collins, 1999.
Labels:

Comments

tess said…
OUCH! :-( get better soon!
July 31, 2012
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here .  * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...
1 comment
Read more

Fermented bread and butter pickle recipe ft. L. Plantarum

After Dr. Davis said the other night that  L. plantarum  may reduce some of the effects of the herbicide glyphosate (which is everywhere), I'm re-running my recipe for fermented bread and butter pickles. Pickling cucumbers naturally have  L. plantarum  bacteria on them, and fermenting them with some brown sugar multiplies these bacteria. (Just don't use chlorinated water to wash them.) And if you're growing your own cucumbers, avoid spraying the fruits with  Bacillus thuringiensis , or Bt (leaves and vines are OK). It's unclear what effect a big dose of Bt would have on humans. Another benefit of DIY pickles: no emulsifiers like polysorbate 80, which is a common ingredient in pickles. If you have GI problems, it could be from emulsifiers. These sweet-and-sour pickles are the tastiest I've ever made. There's just a little added sugar (some of which the bacteria will consume) and turmeric that gives the pickles their bright color.  Special equipment Quar...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cardio: A Waste of Valuable Dance Time

"I'd rather hold a girl in my arms than a football." -Joe DeCicco, friend and dancing fanatic Have you heard that it takes a woman 77 hours of exercise to lose a kilogram of fat? (For us Americans, that's half a pound.) That's according to a study cited by Dr. John Briffa .(1) The women who huffed and puffed three hours a week for a year ended up 4.4 pounds lighter than the sedentary women. That doesn't surprise me: my own weight loss involved a lot less exercise than what I'd been doing. I did no cardio workouts, just strength training . I had more time and energy for dancing, which is a stress reliever, helps keep me in shape, and it's a ton of fun. It's not expensive to dance (as long as you stay away from the studios). I've found excellent lessons at clubs where the teachers really care about the students getting it. Here in Denver, there are dancing clubs that are run by nonprofit organizations, where the prices are reasonable and...
1 comment
Read more

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...
6 comments
Read more