Home Early

Didn't ride the trainer this morning. I guess maybe I didn't sleep too well last night, considering that I fell asleep on the couch and didn't force myself to switch over to the bed until around 3:00 a.m. I had decided on Sunday to see how it would go without the pain-killers, so I'd taken only a couple of Tylenol all day. I learned a few things from that experiment. The first was that the medicine works pretty well. The other was that by far the most pain I was having was coming from a few ribs in my back rather than the broken clavicle. By evening I was quite certain that I did indeed have a broken rib, which I'd been suspecting for a while. The thing that really convinced me of that was an unexpected sneeze. Yeouch! So anyway, after dinner I took half of a Lorcet. Lessons learned. I ended up ordering a couple of cycling movies (The Hard Road and Pro) to play on my laptop while I'm on the trainer. Apparently I become something of a spendthrift when I'm using narcotics, even at low doses!

I find that I'm very grumpy when I don't ride in the morning. To make matters worse, when I got to work this morning, while the levee ride was probably still somewhere in Jefferson Parish, I discovered that Tulane's entire Ethernet was down. No email, no web, no network connectivity at all. I put in a call to the help desk and it sounded like they were still in detective mode trying to figure out what had melted down, so I went to Plan B, which was to use my fax line to dial-up to my Bellsouth (aka AT&T) account. Problem was, it didn't like my password. So after calling their tech services guys, I got my password reset and at least I had Internet access. I'd almost forgotten how slow dial-up could be. At least it was a rest day for the Giro d' Italia, so I didn't miss the live video of the race. Once again, I have to hand it to the BellSouth tech guys, they were quick, knowledgable, spoke English, and this one was actually located in New Orleans too. Class act. So I survived on dial-up until the university system got going again, which wasn't until around 11:00. I was told that it had been a firewall issue at the hospital, which doesn't make much sense to me, but whatever...

So this afternoon I had an appointment with the orthopedist for 3:00 which of course conflicted a bit with a 2:00 conference call that I had to skip out on at 2:30. They took the usual couple of x-rays, and when we met I explained that I thought I had a broken rib because it hurt more than the clavicle. So the doctor finally took a look at the full chest x-ray and came back quite excited to have found not one, but three broken ribs. Whoohooo! Of course at that point I wasn't surprised and besides, there's nothing to be done about that, which I knew already, except to get used to the pain for a few extra weeks. The clavicle, on the other hand, is apparently doing pretty much what we wanted and things are progressing as planned, so I'll likely be in this brace for another week or two before I can graduate to a different one. The appointment went pretty quickly and we didn't have to wait around hardly at all, but even so it was nearly 4 pm when we left, so there was no point in fighting traffic to get back to the office just to have to turn around and come home, so I got home early today. Maybe I'll spend a little time on the trainer this evening. One can hope.....