Monday, July 02, 2012

the cast period

this post and a a bunch to follow will be in all lower case with minimum characters (shift buttons are not easy for me these days) and with a lot of typos because this cast on my hand is messing up my blog functioning.  it's cool though because this will be known as the 'cast period' when i'm studied in blogging courses at universities some day, or more likely in case profiling for nut-jobs. 

i think i mentioned in a previous post that this is a kickball injury.  yes, the game we played in recess as a kid.  yes, the ball is big and mushy, so there is no logical answer for how i could manage to hurt myself other than i'm a fragile wuss of a man.

knowing that i would have to get surgery on the finger monday morning, screwing up most physical activity for just about the whole summer, i decided to soak up as much beach volleyball time as possible sunday afternoon by lake michigan in chicago.  volleyball on sundays in the summertime for me is like church to people who go to that sort of thing - people with beliefs and a moral compass.  volleyball is one of the first things i think about when i think of chicago summers, and my whole week is out of whack if i don't get out there.  that being said, i was geeked to get onto the beach, and only an hour or so in, a giant storm comes out of nowhere.  it got suddenly dark with insane winds, all the seagulls were getting the f' out of there in a hurry, and a voice comes over the p.a. telling us to do the same.

oats and i sought refuge by his place for a while and put on the cubs home game to watch for when they pulled the tarp to play ball as a means of gauging when the storm was going to blow over, which it eventually did in a couple of hours.  so i'm hauling balls on my bike back to the beach on the lakeshore drive bike path, and when i'm almost to our courts, this middle aged man i'm about to pass suddenly decides that he needs to do a u-turn right into oncoming traffic without looking.  i actually reasoned in my head that i had zero time to avoid this and just braced for impact, t-boning him, knocking us both off our bikes.  he kept asking if i was okay, and i told him i was - but only to get away from him without swearing at him.  then he asked if my bike was all right, and i saw the chain hanging off and the front tire knocked flat.  still, i said i was fine and locked the thing up to get a few games in before fixing it at the boathouse up the road.

because the back tire still had air, i just flipped it upright and literally ran to the bike shop barefoot.  on my way i heard a squak and felt a shot to the back of my head and immediately knew it was that asshole bird who dive-bombs the back of people's heads.  i wrote a post about him years ago, but i'm too lazy to provide you with a link.  the point is that this was just not a good day for me.  then the bike guy tells me that the wheel is all screwed up and it cost me around 70 bucks.  guess i should have taken the idiot who hit me straight to the shop instead of jumping right into a few rounds of v-ball, but i was sort of in shock and very pissed.

when i got into the shower that night i found some very gnarly bruises and then found a few more scrubbing up before surgery this morning.  i had to tell the doctors where all t he damage was so no one could think or claim that  some whacky stuff went down during the operation. 

this stupid injury is very annoying to me because i'm an extremely active person, and there are very few types of exercise i can do.  also, at my summer job i need to handle things quickly and efficiently (like dealing with each customer for around 12 seconds), which i love, but it's going to be a pisser with this thing on me.  however, the way i see it, there are people in the world with afflictions far worse than this, and many of them had much more critical surgeries down the hall from me this very morning.  as for work, i remember a girl i worked with years ago doing the same job with very little use of one hand, and that was permanent.

it has just been a bad couple of days so i wanted to get it down onto the page, even if i have it more in perspective now.  thanks for listening if you have made it this far into this whopper-long post.  and here's a pic of edward .44 magnum hand, and yeah, i have eyes.  that's just my trademark here at the the gancer:

have gun, will travel - and write corny captions.


7 comments:

Michael5000 said...

I'm really enjoying these injury posts. I must be a real jerk.

Isn't volleyball kind of a strange pre-hand surgery choice? It seems like if you had a hand injury, volleyball would be something that could make it worse. Or, somebody could jump in front of your bike on the way to the game.

At least you didn't get struck by lightning in the storm. And no wacky stuff went down during the operation. Probably.

sybil law said...

Awww - sucks about your hand. Think of all the stories you can make up about how you hurt it, though!

Gorilla Bananas said...

Oh, heck, that's a big cast. Good to hear you're adapting to your one-handed condition and I hope you'll stay patient.

Radioactive Tori said...

That sucks. I got a concussion once when playing kickball and wondered how I managed to do that do I get it. We should stick together with our oddball injuries...or maybe not since we both seem to have crazy weird injuries and would probably end up killing each other in some freak accident type of thing that only someone with the oddball injury gene could get.

Did that even make sense? I can't figure out how to fix it do it does so I'll just hope that you either get what I mean or else are on some good pain drugs and don't really care what I wrote in the first place. All this nonsense is to say that I hope you have a speedy recovery (did that make you think of mr Rogers? Because it totally made me think of the speedy delivery thing).

I swear I'm not even drunk right now although if I didn't know that then this comment would lead me to believe it. Feel better soon!!!!!

Radioactive Tori said...

Also-the s and d key are way too close on my iPhone so good luck figuring out which words I meant to be do and which ones I meant to be so. This only makes my crazy comment appear more crazy. Sorry! Feel better soon!

Cocaine Princess said...

Ouch! That looks painful and yes a hand injury can be annoying. Hope you're on the mend.

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater said...

5000: it really dint hurt before the surgery, but every night in bed it hurts like a bastard. glad u r enjoying my pain! haha.

gorilla: im getting pretty good at everything w the left hand. not bad.

radio: that was a nutty coment. u sure u r not still concussed?

cocaine: i'm just about back in action. right, just annoying.