Third Monday

As I stood there looking out the 6th floor window of Ochsner's Intensive Care Unit this morning, it struck me that this was the third Monday in a row I'd done so.  It's a long story, and an off-topic one for this particular blog, but when Matt recently sent me an email entitled "Account for Yourself" I thought a brief explanation for my absence was in order.  As much as I would like to say that I had made an impulsive decision to spend a couple of weeks secretly training and eating tainted meat in northern Spain with the rest of the peloton, I was, indeed still am, spending my time mostly off the bike and rather stressed at the ICU watching my mother struggle to recover from a Christmas night 911 call prompted by respiratory failure and further complicated by age, arterial disease, a serious UTI, and who knows what else.  Fortunately I have two sisters in town, plus a couple of my mother's friends, and a visit by my brother to help share the load. It has been a long road thus far and we don't know how it will all play out, but we remain hopeful.

So as the situation at the hospital has permitted, I've managed to get in a few relatively short and uneventful rides over the past couple of weeks. I even made it out to the Giro a week ago on a day when things were looking particularly good. It reminds me a bit of those first few weeks after Katrina when I'd go out for rides that were aimed more at stress relief and maintenance (aka not getting too much fatter) than actual training.  This morning it was cold and windy, but since I hadn't been on the bike all weekend because of a complicated aortic valve balloon dilation and subsequent emergency vascular surgery to resolve some resulting peripheral arterial blockage, I figured I'd better get in whatever saddle time I could.  In this case it was a 6 am Monday morning ride on the levee, which was understandably deserted but for Erich who was out for a run and a couple of walkers.  In the meantime, a few of those little tasks that I normally take care of late at night, including LAMBRA stuff, blog updates, and routine work and personal email, have been falling through the cracks. So if you've been getting uncharacteristically curt and grammatically compromised emails from me lately, or if I just haven't replied at all, well, at least I have a good excuse.