Crutches and Cancellations

This is around where the crash happened. That ditch on the left was deeper than it looks in the image!

I was wheeled out of the hospital Tuesday afternoon after the final x-ray showed no evidence of pneumothorax, or I guess anything else that would call for more time there. I have a couple of crutches that got me up the stairs and into the house, although even by then I could tell that my abs and various other long-neglected core muscles were going to be sore as hell even from the minimal use of the crutches I'd already attempted. Keeping the leg with the pelvic fracture off the ground by using the already stressed muscles on the same side with the broken ribs is pretty difficult. I came home with three or four prescriptions, including Hydrocodone, and the timing of those was complicated enough that I set them all up on Medisafe app I'd already been using for the statin I started taking some time ago.

Good to go

Consistent with all of my prior experiences, the broken bones are taking a long time to stop hurting, which is to say they hurt just about as much as ever. Getting in and out of bed is a challenge. Hell, anything aside from sitting in a chair is a challenge right now. It will come as no surprise that this is no fun, but it's made even worse by looking out the window at the spectacular riding weather out there. Anyway, I am pretty much immobile right now and will probably remain that way for a couple more days until, hopefully, things start to show tangible signs of healing. Sigh...

Yesterday, due to the COVID-19 situation, Tulane made the call and is ending all classes on Friday. There will be no classes next week when on-campus students will have to leave. The rest of the semester will be done entirely online. All events with participation over 50 have been cancelled. Of course, we had our Green Wave Classic race scheduled for the weekend of the 21st and 22nd. We had a few pre-registrations, but zero collegiate registrations outside of Tulane, and with the current panic over corona virus and the fact that every event I can think of has already cancelled, we had to make the decision to cancel the race. So I spent much of the morning un-doing what had been done, starting with an email to USAC to cancel the event, then cancelling it on BikeReg, issuing as many refunds as possible, which wasn't all of them. BikeReg had already made one disbursement to the NOBC account, so Mignon will need to make those refunds separately from the club bank account. I also had to remove the event and/or links from the Tulane Cycling website, LAMBRA calendar, and NOBC calendar page. Hopefully I did all of that right. I was under the influence of hydrocodone throughout. Meanwhile at work plans are being made in case the university decides to have the staff start working from home. No decision on that yet, however. Meanwhile, bike races are getting cancelled left and right. The big race in Birmingham just got cancelled today, which is really a shame. That event was no doubt a very heavy lift and already had 450 riders registered. Such a shame.

Since I'm kind of stuck chained to my desk at home I thought I'd see if I could find the place where the crash on Saturday happened on Google maps. It wasn't too hard. Starting with Strava, I could pretty easily pinpoint where my ride ended. At the very end, the grade on the elevation chart went from -1.2% to something like -10.5%. Anyway, I then found the location on Google maps and could see the street view images. So there it is. I ended up at the bottom of the ditch on the left wondering what the hell just happened and why is there someone on top of me.

So hopefully things will get better bit by bit over the next few days. It would be a big step forward, pun intended, if I could get to where my abs and core could again handle my body weight so I could easily keep my left leg off the ground like I could back when I was in the hospital and practicing stairs with the occupational therapy folks. That little episode, however successful at convincing them I was safe to release into the world, resulted in some seriously painful and practically useless muscles the following day. If I can get to where I can move around on the crutches without pain, that would really help.