Deja Vu All Over Again: Another Broken Hip
it’s July and I once again find myself with limited mobility after dumping a bicycle. Once again, I have been very lucky. Though my injuries will take some weeks to heal, so far it looks like they all will, and I’ll be able to resume my active life. The outlier in healing is an acetbular fracture of my pelvis. Basically I rammed the head of my femur through one of my pelvic bones. The fine folks at UCLA have reassembled it and put more metal in there to hold it together until it regrows. Unfortunately the knitting bone can’t take weight until that process is complete.
More Adamantium
Last time this happened, I was able to relate a lot of the story of how I fell and how I found myself in the hospital. This time I’ve been spared those details. I don’t know if I hit my head harder; there isn’t so much as a tender spot on my head and I was wearing a helmet. It may just be shock from a wider range of injuries. For whatever reason, I remember biking home for most of the trip and then being in the Emergency Room at UCLA medical center with Brenda. I have no feeling of discontinuity – no memory of waking up asking “where am I?” – just the feeling that the brain was running for a while with the recorder off. Brenda tells me I was in clear diminished capacity when I called her, repeating things and not forming complex sentences. Like I say, I have no obvious bumps and the scans all came back negative. I’m lucky again.
What I did get this time that I didn’t last time was my HMO (Kaiser Permanente) and UCLA wrangling over who was going to do what for me. UCLA surgeons did the repair, and I was moved over to a Kaiser facility for a couple days of recovery. Doctors at both facilities reviewed my case, and everyone was professional and helpful. There were some frustrating hiccoughs in getting transferred and vetted at the new place on a Saturday night, but all things considered it all worked out.
Now I’m home and getting around on crutches. Today I went in to work for the first time and was even a little productive.
I am humbled by the kindness of my family, friends, and co-workers. Everyone has been extremely generous and helpful. And they have been the same fabulous people after going through a similar thing with me a few months ago. My friends continue to amaze me.
In January, I spent a few months getting back up on my feet and back to what I was doing. This experience occasions some more soul searching. I simply cannot keep living in a way that puts me in a hospital with serious injuries every six months. I am keenly aware that I have been very lucky twice in six months, and that’s not a tenable strategy. Taking one of these falls 30 miles from home on the highway could turn out much worse.
I also love many things about my biking experiences. So while I can’t do it, I’m going to be thinking about how to keep the good parts in my life and reduce the risks associated with them. I’ll keep this blog updated as I work that out.
So for the next few months this blog will augment the book reviews with hip fracture reviews; if you get a choice, break the ball, not the socket.
Thanks for listening.