collarbone « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

collarbone

My collarbone, before and after

Surgery, that is. Saw my ortho today for the latest check up. I waited in his waiting room for 40 minutes. First time I wasn’t just whisked inside. I waited in an exam room for quite some time too. He spent about four minutes with me. Checked my range of motion, heard my complaints and said everything was coming along just as it should. Even my complaints are normal.

We took an X-ray.

Old busted:

New hotness:

That’s the finest titanium from Germany. Hopefully the screws are of equal craftsmanship. There’s no need to have six screws loose.

I wrote, a while back, about Fabian Cancellara:

This is what I don’t understand: Professional cyclist Fabian Cancellara broke his collarbone at the beginning of April. He fell in a race in a bad way. He had a quadruple fracture. I’ve seen the X-ray, it was bad. And yet, just two months later, he won the prologue of the Tour de France and held the lead for days. I’m not making a comparison, because that’s just foolish. Cancellara is a terrific cyclist and a hard man, but how did he do that?

I asked the surgeon about that.

“Hey, doc, clearly this guy is a superior athlete. I’m not what he is, but how did he do that?”

“Training, therapy, incentive.”

“I know that’s his livelihood,” I said “but how did he endure that?”

“That’s not your livelihood is it?”

“No.”

“Then don’t worry about it.”

I’ll just console myself that he spent more time lying on the ground than I did. They put him on a gurney. I walked off.

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7
Aug 12

“The sky has a six pack”

Keeping busy. All is grand. Peachy keen, really. I should be doing less. This is my contradiction: I can’t do much, naturally I want to do more.

I’m learning what to do when, meaning: not that and never. This is a slow trial and error process. I think I should be able to do everything I normally do, of course. Need help hauling that cement? Doing a bit of roofing repair? Playing a little tag football? I can’t do those things yet. (I don’t know anything about roofing, but give me a few months and I’ll come help you carry cement bags if you like.) It frustrates me a bit that I can’t do the basics, like pick up things, or reach.

This is the other thing I know: don’t push through the pain barrier.

Easy to say, difficult to do. Three days of medium activity means I’ve asked too much of a shoulder just three weeks removed from the operating table. That’s created a cumulative discomfort. Happily, all of the things I’d complain about are par for the course based on what I’ve read; I just need to do less. Being hurt does not allow for a lot of exciting blogging.

Meantime, I looked out of the windows to the east this evening and saw the neighborhood bathed in a beautiful light. I walked outside to the west and saw this:

We do have the best sunsets here.

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4
Aug 12

Fifty-nine

I overdid it today. I am careful not to do things my body won’t let me, mind you, but the repetition did me in today. There were things to do, you see, things that needed to get done. Household work, if you must know, Copper. The Yankee was doing a great deal of it. I’m limited with my bum shoulder, that’s my alibi, Slim. I don’t like not being able to do things, though. And I like less watching someone else do it, even with an injury that limits me. Do you know what I mean?

At one point she told me “You’re done.” But I wasn’t, you see. I had, in my mind, already drawn the stopping point, and it was about 20 minutes beyond that moment. And so I did it, the extra 20 minutes. Now I’ve come to ache because of it. Maybe I was done when she said so. Perhaps earlier. It doesn’t really matter.

I hurt.

So, tomorrow, I’m taking it easy.

But we got almost everything done. None of it more exciting than household work. But at least the things were ticked off of the day’s list. I have the satisfaction of that and a large ice pack on my collarbone.

I’ll leave you with this:

That’s from the 1903 Glomerata (the Auburn University yearbook). It arrived today. I picked it up on e-bay for $20. A steal, for a sixth volume, despite a few missing pages. This book is 109 years old. Everyone in it is dust. Some of the buildings are still with us. There are tantalizing things in this book, which we’ll dive into one day. But, just read that ad again.

Don’t drink. But if you will …

The temperance movement was in full swing, or headed there, in the South in those days. In 1908 four counties were wet. People in the movement could easily count how many counties, otherwise, had between one and four bars. And so this guy wanted you to avoid the sauce. But, should you need to know, he had the sauciest stuff around.

I love that phone number, too: 59. We note the old ads all the time and think: Surely there were more than 59 phones in town by then. But in 1900 Opelika only had 4,245 people. The first phones apparently came to the state 20 years before, but wouldn’t this technology still be elusive in poor, rural areas? In 1919 there were all of 650 cars in the entire county. Sure the phone number 59, in 1903 was part of an exchange much larger than one small town.

But wouldn’t you like to have that number today? Every now and then someone that knows too much about cell phone prefix systems is amazed at my old number, but it has seven digits. Fifty-nine? I’d just make that the business card.

G.P Butler would be named a judge a few years later — before Prohibition. No word on if his store stayed open. Around that time Lee County built a brand new and modern jail, in 1914, according to a statewide prison report. Butler served two meals a day. You woke up and ate, had dinner in the mid-day. Then you waited from 1 p.m. until the next morning for more food.

Back then prison food was probably even worse than today.

He also fed the residents of the local pauper home, at least once, for Christmas in 1922. If you will eat …

That story was published last year in one of the local weeklies. It is a collection of details about the Poor Farm. Times were tough. “The people who lived there worked on the farm if they were able to work. They planted, tilled and harvested the crops, then cooks prepared the meals.” I wonder how that’d go over today. (Not very.)

Anyway. Butler served as probate until he died in 1933, but that genealogy page doesn’t give the date. Did he outlive Prohibition? It was killed the same year.

And what was his phone number when he died thirty years later? Sixty?

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2
Aug 12

Yes, I’d be a cat in my home

“That settles it. The cat loves you more than she loves me!”

Those were the words I heard two weeks ago. This was just after I broke my collarbone. We had noticed that Allie wasn’t quite herself. And she was losing her hair. We looked up the reasons cats lose their hair. It could be dietary or a disease or stress. We haven’t changed her diet. And she seemed healthy enough in every other respect — just as wacky as ever. And there’s no more stress-free environment for a cat, I think, than our home.

Nevertheless, out of concern The Yankee took her cat to the vet. They performed all the vet tests. I’m sure they spelled out some things so the c-a-t wouldn’t catch o-n. (She’s a smart cat, we tell ourselves, in jest. We know how smart she is and isn’t.)

But when she came home she put the cat carrier on the ground and opened it up to return Allie to her normal environment. She recounted the conversation with the vet.

She looks small, but she’s incredibly active and kitten-like for a cat of her age. She doesn’t have any symptom of disease or illness. So maybe it is stress, the vet says. “Have you gotten new furniture? A new pet? A new kid? A new car?”

No, no, no, no … and how does a new car figure into that? What cat patient of yours told you that?

The only thing that is different, my darling wife told the vet, is that I broke my collarbone. I was in an immobilizer and sitting in the arm chair. Her chair. (It was about the only place I could get comfortable for two weeks.) The problem, as far as we could tell, is that Allie wasn’t spending her regular amount of time on me. She has an afternoon nap in my lap and there’s a part of the evening where she comes to visit me. Also every time someone stands up she acts like a toddler. “Hold me, hold me.” I didn’t do a lot of that for several days.

That’s it, the vet said. Everything else is the same. She can’t get in his lap and he’s forced her out of her chair. Only you can’t do anything about that for a while.

So she came home and said that. “The cat loves you more than she loves me! Whenever I’ve gotten ill you’ve never had to take her to the vet because she was stressed out about it.”

The next week, the very day I removed the immobilizer she was all over me again. She’d stayed away on her own prior to that.

Earlier this week I moved from the chair over to the sofa. I can sit comfortably there again. (Small victories.)

Allie?

Everything is back to normal in her world.

I would make some allusion to July rolling out and August wet-heaving its way in. But this is summer in the Deep South. You don’t even really notice it anymore after a time. The movement, I mean. You notice the heat. Can’t get away from the heat sometimes. And the heat tends to minimize your movement unless you’re in the mood for it. But June turns into July and the mercury really takes a big jump. August, as a season, never feels much different from July.

You don’t notice a change until late September. And usually that is more of a left brain “Good grief it is almost October, enough with the heat already!”

There is no out like a baker’s oven, in like a sauna comparison for today, though. Everything is just hot. To spice things up you’ll sometimes get distance thunder. We had that today, and more due in the overnight. To really spice things up you might be in the right spot every now and then to get thunder really close by. I woke up to the that earlier this week. Lightning strikes were very close, according to the old lifeguard counting trick. The thunder wasn’t loud, but Lord how it rolled. I counted three different strikes where I could hear the energy moving away for 30 seconds or more.

Rode my bike in the trainer this evening. Got an hour in. Felt really good, until it didn’t. It is amazing how much fitness you can lose in three weeks. But that is a problem of my lungs. My arm is fine. I turned the pedals standing out of the saddle, too, reducing my points of contact to four. Felt great.

So that’s right on schedule. My doctor said two to three weeks for the stationary, and next Monday is three weeks. He told me it will be four or five weeks before I can ride again on the road. I might err on the long side of that estimate though, just to be sure.

This is what I don’t understand: Professional cyclist Fabian Cancellara broke his collarbone at the beginning of April. He fell in a race in a bad way. He had a quadruple fracture. I’ve seen the X-ray, it was bad. And yet, just two months later, he won the prologue of the Tour de France and held the lead for days. I’m not making a comparison, because that’s just foolish. Cancellara is a terrific cyclist and a hard man, but how did he do that?

I’ll just console myself that he spent more time lying on the ground than I did. And I walked off. Of course, he had a bevy of doctors telling him to wait for the ambulance. You don’t get a premiere athlete up and walk him around after a spill like his. YouTube it if you like — Cancellara + Flanders 2012 should do it — I’m not interested in watching bike crashes all day.

Out for dinner tonight. Visitors were passing through town and had a craving for Niffers. That’s what people always want when they come back to town. Even, we learned tonight, the politicians. (We know politicians.) Good thing we like the place. (They now have cheesecake, the sign said.)

And that’s really the day. I rested, I read, I rode, I stretched my shoulder, I ate. It was delightful in almost every way, but I would like to be moving just a little bit more. Every day a little bit more, right?

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31
Jul 12

The et cetera of Tuesday

Things that are overrated:

NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. Tape delays and poor editing choices all around. Record early ratings, but record complaints too. Will those people stick around long enough to make this a loss leader? Can NBC show any event in a real way, rather than editing it for “drama.” Sports are not fiction. And fiction hurts credibility. The thing about credibility: it transcends organizational divisions. People aren’t noticing and complaining about things that NBC Sports is doing. They’re complaining about NBC. That should concern a 20th century network vainly trying to figure out the 21st century.

Sitting still with a hurt wing.

Having something else (my neck) hurt while my shoulder is recovering from surgery. One thing I could stand, I guess. There seem to be no comfortable positions when you have two things in pain. My neck, then, can stop hurting any time.

And so I did not ride my bike on the trainer today. I opted for mere discomfort instead.

We watched The Dark Knight Rises this afternoon:

If you’ve been avoiding all contact with this film until you could see it don’t worry: nothing in that trailer is actually in the movie. And I won’t tell you that Darth Vader is actually Batman’s father. You won’t hear it from me. (But Rocky did win the big fight.)

If you have seen the movie: OMG! I can’t believe that one scene!

OK, I will spoil one thing. This is a still from the opening shot:

I’ve thought, through the entire series, that Gordon was the best character. He proved it again in this installment, but still it feels like you never really get the chance to know him.

One other thing, I love the composition of that shot. I’d like to watch the movie again to study how they frame the quieter scenes. A lot of them are worth observing. But this one in particular is terrific. Two pictures of Harvey Dent. The large one, looking over all of us. The smaller portrait, sitting over Gordon’s shoulder. The exposure on half his face a bit darker this time.

For an action film, there were quite a few little gems like gems like that.

The film is worth seeing, if you’re on the fence. You need the previous two movies to make it go, if you’re one of the four people who haven’t caught them yet. It is possibly not the best of the series, but aside from a few lines of dialogue that should have been punched up, it is a quality story.

Oh, two other things. On IMDB we learned that the person who designed Bane’s coat spent two years on it. Remarkable. Also the studio wanted more Riddler. But, if you read the notes on IMDB, you’ll see that Christopher Nolan et al resisted that as “too derivative.” An odd thing consider, if you read all of the notes on IMDB or all of the comics (I don’t); many things from this movie started in the picture books.

Finally, I saw this banner in the lobby of the movie theater:

And they say you can’t get any culture in a small town. I’m mildly curious about that. Opera, at the movie theater. That’s an interesting showpiece. I should probably check that out sometime. It might make up for having watched stinkers like Sleepy Hollow, She’s All That and Phantom Menace in the same building.

And the last Twilight movie, we watched that there, too, but I block those out. With that in mind I might need something useful like a bit of opera in the movie theater.

More tomorrow, perhaps a less painful and more cheery oeuvre!