Visited the orthopedic surgeon again for another checkup today. He moved my arm once, glanced at his handiwork, answered three questions, asked two and referenced something we said conversationally when we met two weeks ago.
One of his assistants removed my two cosmetic stitches. They look like fishing line. Removing them was like pulling out one hair by its super-long root. The Yankee pronounced the incision “not as bad as I thought” saying later “it looks like a bad scratch.” And so it does.
Therapy starts in two weeks. I’ll be on my bike on the indoor trainer by then.
I finally got around to taking a few more pictures of my now destroyed bike helmet. The original picture was taken on my wife’s iPhone, side-lit by my friend’s iPhone, when we were all calmly waiting for someone in the emergency room to call my name. Now that I have two hands again, for the most part, I decided to use my real camera for more detail.
[If this is all new to you, here’s the accident, the hospital and the surgery.]
This is the back of the helmet, as seen from above. So you’d be wearing this and facing the top of the frame. The thin plastic aesthetic cover popped right off when I hit the ground. (I brought it home for posterity, but it didn’t suffer any serious damage like you’ll see here.) Note the chunk that the road just sheared off. Part of that is resting beside the helmet:
Again the back, this time from straight on. See how the upper left and center of the back was ground away? Note the small cracking at the base of the helmet’s back as well. See that crack on the left side? We’ll get to that next:
Here’s that left-side damage. Hardly a hairline crack:
This is a little farther up the side, but still on the left. As you’re wearing the helmet this crack would be directly over the left ear. The fracturing only stops at the air vent. Who knows how far it could have gone beyond that in a solid form, like a skull. From these pictures we can surmise that, without the helmet, the crown of my head over to my ear would have been heavily damaged:
Finally, looking up into the helmet. That’s one-piece, molded crash foam. Look how much it separated:
Tomorrow I’m going to write about something else, promise. Pictures of other things on Tumblr. Lots more on Twitter.
