Oh, SNAP!!

This blog is about to become much less adventure oriented for the next 6 weeks or so. Why 6 weeks, you ask? Well, because apparently that's how long it takes for a busted hand to heal.

Jeffo, Fawcett and myself were out riding yesterday on Mt Fromme. We were riding down "Boundary" and had gotten past the worst of the frosty woodwork. I was feeling good and was riding stuff that I had never ridden before, like the steep wooden ladders in this photo. I got half way across the log, and knew I was going to fall off, so I tried to put some distance between me and the bike. The bike, not wanting to go down on its own, grabbed my foot and we both landed in the creek all tangled up.


As soon as I picked myself up I knew that my hand was broken. Fawcett and Jeffo made an amazing splint with leg armour and we walked out. I was pretty cold and wet from having just spent more time than I would've wanted to in a snow-fed creek, but my hand was really starting to get sore so we headed off to the hospital.

In an amazing stroke of luck, Fawcett's girlfriend, Carolyn, who is a doctor, was working in the trauma department that day, and since they weren't very busy in trauma, she was able to come down and shepherd me through, from getting the X-rays done to paging the plastic surgeons.

The plastic surgery team tells me that they'll be calling me sometime this week to book me in the following day to operate. They'll be inserting some wires to hold everything in place, then putting my arm into a cast, which will stay on for 2 1/2 weeks before coming off and being replaced by a different one.


Here are the X-rays with the bad news bits circled. The one on the left shows how close to the knuckle the break is. That bit of bone sticking up shouldn't be there. The one on the right shows how dislocated it is.

Apart from the time we had planned to spend building on Hornby, it's a pretty quiet time and probably the best time - if there is such a thing - to have this kind of injury. And it's quite difficult to type the blog, since I'm used to touch typing, but I'm sure that'll improve with practice.

I'm going to go crazy taking transit to work instead of riding my bike and Rachelle's workload will increase until I can get back to opening jars and carrying boxes.