Quarantine

How coincidental is it that I am stuck in the house at just the time that many people are being self-quarantined and others are practicing "social distancing," a term I'd never heard until yesterday. Sitting here at my home office, feeling very socially distanced, looking out the window at a beautiful warm spring day, and all I can think about is how nice it would be to be out there on the bike. Meanwhile, practically every other email I've been getting has be a notification that something else has been cancelled or closed to the public or otherwise taken offline. This is going to have such a terrible impact on people who work at restaurants, hotels, conferences, etc. Practically every bike race I know of for the next few weeks has been cancelled already.

Tulane's campus will be pretty quiet within a week as the residence halls close down and most students head home to continue their studies online. Quite a few of our Tulane cycling team members, however, will be staying in town since they have been living off-campus anyway. Tulane staff are still reporting to work as usual, but there are still preparations being made in case they are directed to start working from home. Since I am already basically working at home as best as I can under the circumstances, I had Candy go by my office today and grab my external backup hard drive. That gives me access to everything that was on my office computer since the end of last week, which was also the last day I was in the office. Today, in order to be able to access our financial reporting software, I installed a VPN on my laptop. Most of the other systems I use are 3rd party systems, so they are still accessible as usual from home.

Danielle, who has a vast amount of experience getting around, or not getting around, on crutches send me a cup holder that attaches to one of the crutches (yes, I had already been thinking about clamping a carbon water bottle cage there) and a Kasa smart switch. I moved the little Echo Dot we had in the living room that we hardly ever used for anything into the bedroom and added the Kasa device, so now I can turn the bedside light on and off via Alexa. That actually helps a lot because in my current situation it's really hard, if not impossible, to roll over and reach out to turn the light on or off. Since I have a few medications that I need to take at various times during the night, that will make it a lot easier. One really shouldn't be employing guesswork when deciding which pills are in which bottle! It's about time to ease off the narcotic and switch to just Tylenol, so I'll see if that's feasible tomorrow.

This morning the nursing home where my father lives sent out a robocall saying that the home would be closed to visitors, including family. As we know, COVID-19 has been particularly dangerous to older people, and whether most of us realize it or not, much of the response to the pandemic is, in effect, an effort to save our older family members. I'm a little worried about this, of course.

So the situation update right now is that I am having slightly less trouble getting around on the crutches. The pelvis seems to hurt mainly when my left leg is suspended, so when that foot is on the floor just enough to support the leg's weight, it doesn't hurt much at all. When I lift it to move on the crutches it hurts a bit more, but really most of the pain in that situation is coming from my lower abdominals that I obviously strained the day in the hospital when they were showing me how to use the crutches and I was going up and down the stairs with relative ease while unknowingly tearing the the hell out of those undeveloped muscles. Above the waist, most of the pain actually feels like it comes from my left back, even though the fractures are, as far as I know, on the front. I really wish I could see one of the x-rays. Anyway, I guess things are progressing as one might expect, which is slowly. I'm starting to think about trying to get someone to retrieve my bike from the Tulane Cycling facility so I can at least assess the damage. If all I need is a new derailleur and a straightened hanger, I'll be pretty happy.