Under the knife

Well, a week can make all the difference.  I went to Dr. Wenneker again on Monday expecting some sort of head scratching and song and dance about what might be wrong with my leg.  To my surprise, he took one look at the report from the radiology lab and said, "Oh here it say's you've got a torn labrum."

Umm, isn't that what I was calling about all last week?

Apparently Jefferson Hospital is just as dysfunctional as the rest of the medical profession; Wenneker was never notified that the MRI that he'd requested for me was complete.  What the fuck.  At this point though, I'm honestly happy that they found something, anything that could be at the root of all of the problems that have kept me from my beloved bike riding for the past 18 months.  Let's get me into surgery and get me recovering and make this happen.

I called the surgical specialists at the Rothman Institute, the orthopedic specialty clinic at Jefferson, and was expecting a long wait.  Every other time I've tried to schedule an appointment with a specialist it's been a 4-6 week wait and I expected something similar here.  Nope, called on Monday, in on Wednesday.  I got in to see a guy who specializes in hip surgery at one of the top ranked clinics in the country in 2 days.  Once I got to my appointment, I registered on a touch screen and they called me up to the desk within 1 minute.  Then I completed my patient questionnaire on an Ipad and was ushered into the doctor's suite within 5 minutes.  Totally night and day difference in customer experience.  I did have to wait a fairly long time once I was in the room, but at least I was there, getting seen.  Maybe my standards have been lowered too far, but whatever, at this point it doesn't take much to make me happy.

Once he came in, Dr. Parivisi went over the MRI, X-rays and my patient report, flexed my leg around a little, listened to my symptoms and gave me 2 options.  Option one is to wait for it to see if it heals on its own, with maybe some anti-inflammatories.  Option two is to open me up, clean out the chunks of gristle that are all torn up in there and smooth out the cartilage on my hip.  I figure that if 18 months of pain is probably enough to convince me that time is not going to help.  We're going to go for broke and open me up.  This seems like the only reasonable option at this point, particularly since the last month has seen my hip pain get worse and worse.  I'm now taking 4-6 of my pain pills a day, rather than 2 every couple of days.  Sitting hurts, standing hurts, riding a bike hurts, sleeping hurts.  Time to get this show on the road.  I go in to surgery on July 30th and should go home the same day.  Dr. Parivisi said that I should be fairly mobile with crutches for the first week, and then weight bearing after that.  He expected I'll probably be able to get back on a bike within 3 weeks  and start aggressive physical therapy after that.  Full recovery is rather long though, 3+ months before I get full range of motion and strength close to normal.  Whatever.  I can deal with 3 months of improvement after 18 months of decline.

Fucking leg

Just a place holder here for what will probably be a diatribe.  My leg continues to hurt unabated.  I had an MRI a few weeks ago to determine if there was some tearing of the labrum around my hip joint.  After 5 calls, finally got word from the doctor that there was nothing to be found.

Motherfucker.

I was serioiusly pleased at the idea of something that someone could go in and fix.  Now I'm back in no-man's-land with damaged goods and no way forward.

I repeat; Motherfucker.

My RAAM experience was so much better than I anticipated.  I'll post a full synopsis when Meurig finishes, probably some time tomorrow.  In my time back home, I've basically been glued to the live tracker.  You can share the same experience of watching little dots move on a great looking map here:

http://www.tractalis.com/raam2013/ 

Seriously Colorado?

Found this stand in the Denver airport. Did not make a purchase.

RAAm Approacheth

I head out for California tomorrow to start the final prep for Meurig's RAAM attempt.  I'll be working the 12 hour night shift with Meurig's wife Kristie and a bike club friend Kevin the ex-seminarian psychologist.  Should be good times between 7 and 7.  There are 10 of us on the crew all told.  3 person night crew, 3 person day crew and 4 people running logistical support with an RV where we'll do cooking, some sleeping and some washing.  Conveniently, Kristie's cousin is a massage therapist and will be on hand to pummel the cramps out of Meruig, and maybe the rest of us.

I'm kind of on the fence about how enjoyable I think the experience is going to be.  I've seen Bicycle Dreams, and it looks like the majority of the trip will be pretty dull, interspersed with moments of panic or frustration.  That said, I have absolute faith in Meurig's ability to get the job done.  The guy is looking fantastic and has the constitution and mental strength to get across the country. As he put it "I'm just an engine, mate."  You can check out the crazies that do this thing in the trailer here.



Despite the anticipated boredom, I'm actually a bit bummed that I won't be crewing the whole event.  My Cadillac benefits package from the government is pretty crummy when it comes to vacation time and I was only able to take 5 days of vacation for this.  I'll be bailing out in Wichita KS.  The flights hopefully won't be too expensive and I'll take a moment to scrawl an image of the divine Flying Spaghetti Monster on the road before heading home.  The cool thing is that we're going to try to give live updates as often as possible on our way across the country.  I'll be twittering the shit out of the ride at 3 in the morning, so make sure your phone is set to silent mode if you follow along.

New/old leaf

I just bought myself the first new pair of running shoes in 7 years. Asics 2000's seem like a worthy heir to the 10 or so pairs of 1030s, 1040s, 1050s and 1060s that I bought over the course of my college running days.

As an interesting aside, when writing this post from my phone, the word running always seems to come up as "ruining".  Maybe there's a message there.

If bike sharing looks even half as good in real-life as it does in this picture, we can declare success.

Mayor Nutter, testing out bike sharing around Rittenhouse Square last Tuesday.

I'm quasi-famous

So, it seems as though I've got a lot of life to commit to the blog as of late, since time keeps on passing.  Here's an article written about some of the work i'm doing in philly published in Urban Velo magazine this month.  Glad to have been mentioned.  Check out page 61 to read about Philadelphia, and page 65 to see a picture of me in action.

http://www.urbanvelo.org/issue36/p60-61.html

Back on the horse, a little.

This past weekend I did 2 good bike rides in a row.   That's a first in over a year.  Saturday I hung on for the entirety of the ever-crazy, ever-dumb, Saturday Morning World Championships called Vino-Velo .  The basic idea is that you and about 20 of the fastest people who aren't actually racing bikes, but who think they are, get together and ride a set course through the suburbs of Philadelphia.  There are sprints, traffic lights, stop signs, hills etc.  I have avoided it primarily because it's a great example of why drivers hate bike riders here, but it is awfully fun to go fast with other people on bikes.  My knee/hip/leg pain was manageable for the whole ride but I was pretty sore later in the day.  I imagine that's the expected effect of not riding hard for 14 months.

Sunday Jennifer and I went out for a  nice ride through the hills to the northwest of the city on Sunday.  Happily, I wasn't suffering too bad from the ride on Saturday and Jennifer took it easy on me.  She does love to attack up the short hills though.  I'm sure that if it weren't for the whole fear of crashing thing, she'd make a good bike racer.  Now, hopefully the trend keeps up since spring is here.

So, I guess we are a bit wussy in the cold now.

Jennifer decided that she needed her hat in the shower.

A video from when men were men and bicycles were made of STEEL!

Nice sunset

For some reason I really love winter sunsets. This was out near Haverford on a ride yesterday afternoon. For the first time in a long time it felt like my knee was working well. Not anywhere close to 100 percent, but moving in a good direction and that made the sunset all the nicer.

Beaten

Yesterday was my third treatment by a new doctor who has an "alternative" form of treatment for my knee pain problems that have plagued me for the past year.  He does a treatment called IASTM (Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization) which is a classy acronym for pummeling the shit out of my legs and butt.  For decency sake, i'm not going to post the gruesome pictures of my ass bruise, but basically Dr. Wenneker takes something like one of these:

And then does some of this to my leg--

The process is a lot like squeegeing out all of the scar tissue from the muscles and tendons.  Let me tell you, it hurts.  It hurts a lot.  He is also big on something called 'dry needling' which basically sort of surprises your muscle into relaxing and becoming more flexible.  The process involves taking an accupuncture needle and inserting it into the skin over a knot in the muscle, then you stab it in and out at various angles to trick the muscle into relaxing.  That sounds a lot worse than it feels.  Really almost no pain on that one until I watched them doing it and it was basically like watching a sewing machine needle disapear into my flesh.  Weird.

At the end of the day, I really don't care how much the process hurts, as long as the results are there.  So far, so good.  I definitely feel improvement in my mobility, and the tightness and pain around my hip have diminished a lot (except where I got jabbed with the corisone shot yesterday) and I'm hopeful that with some extra strengthening and stretching, I'll actually be able to keep the gains and start riding more.  Fingers crossed.

Go big or go home

That's right folks, Jennifer just received 5 pounds of gummies. Should last  a week or two.

Looks like this guy made a little trip to the hammer store...

I have no idea what was up with the 10 oz claw hammer slung into the chain around this guy's seatpost, but I'm just glad he checked it at the door of my building.

Stoked for snow!

So, while Philly 'endures' these terrible chills into the 30s, Iowa is going to have snow for Christmas!! Here's the forecast for Ames tonight!

Snow with areas of blowing snow. The snow could be heavy at times. Low around 22. Windy, with a east northeast wind 14 to 19 mph becoming north 24 to 29 mph after midnight. Winds could gust as high as 39 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of 7 to 11 inches possible.

Bad day at work cured by good sake at home

This bottle was made about 100 kilometers south if our place in Nagano. We got it on the trip to Vancouver last April. It was my little birthday gift to myself.
Totally hitting the spot now after a trying day at work.

Little shout out to Lara-chan and my onsen buddy Shane. Hope you are doing well wherever you are

Physics

Last Friday my coworkers had a small sendoff party for my boss who's going to be away for the next month on an Eisenhower Fellowship.  Lucky guy.  Well, smart guy really.  Anyway, in honor of Halloween as well, they got a cooler full of dry ice for making party tricks and spooky drinks etc.  By the time the sendoff wound down at about 12, there was still 3/4 of a cooler full of solid CO2 left, and I decided that I might need to take some home with me.  I filled a Tupperware with the stuff and then headed back home.  When I got back, I thought, "Won't this stuff stay frozen a lot better if I put it in a thermos?" 

Check out the dented metal cap.  Probably where it destroyed the light fixture.

Getting out my trusty stainless thermos and dropped in the dry ice cubes.  I sealed the cap nice and tight to make sure that the air didn't get in to warm up the cubes and then Jennifer and I headed off to bed.

Glass Shards EVERYWHERE

At about 1:30 in the morning we were awoken by a giant exploding thud followed by some broken glass shattering down stairs.  "What the hell was that?"   We headed down and found exactly what anyone who has half a brain and understands physics just a little bit would have known.  The plastic cap from the thermos had failed (thankfully) and blasted the top of the thermos off, up through the light fixture and through the drywall into the ceiling.  We never found much of it, just a ton of glass and plastic shards as well as the metal cup/cap thing.

3 inch hole in the ceiling.

Soooo, I spent my evening picking glass shards out of the ceiling and did a full kitchen sweep.  Not like I should have been surprised by this, since I spent much of my teen years thinking of ways to make things explode, I should have known better, or at least put the thermos in someone else's house.

My favorite sport is run by cock smokers

I must say that I've really been enjoying the combined cycling media communitiy's coverage of the UCI defamation suit against Floyd Landis.  It seems that pretty much every story includes the laundry list of things that Floyd Landis can't say about Hein Verbruggen, Pat McQuaid or the UCI.  

For example, this from Velonews

"Piguet’s ruling forbids Landis from “stating that the UCI, McQuaid and/or Verbruggen have concealed cases of doping, received money for doing so, have accepted money from Lance Armstrong to conceal a doping case, have protected certain racing cyclists, concealed cases of doping, have engaged in manipulation, particularly of tests and races, have hesitated and delayed publishing the results of a positive test on Alberto Contador, have accepted bribes, are corrupt, are terrorists, have no regard for the rules, load the dice, are fools, do not have a genuine desire to restore discipline to cycling, are full of shit, are clowns, their words are worthless, are liars, are no different to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, or to make any similar other allegations of that kind.”

Similar stories can be found all over the media sphere, which kind of makes me wonder, isn't the reporting of this case merely magnifying and repeating all the allegations that Landis has made against these dudes?  Well, if so, good.

It reminds me of a story from Alf, my old roommate:  It was a new school year and the principal of Alf's high school called an all school assembly to address what he considered to be a plague of swearing that was sweeping through the student body.  The principal took the podium and after describing how it was disrespectful to use vulgar language,and how stiff penalties would be levied against anyone using swears in the halls or classrooms of the school.  he then proceeded to enumerate all of the words which would not be allowed.

"Students of Shorewood High school will not be allowed to say the following:  fuck, bitch, shit, fag, pussy, whore, cock smoker...."

And all the kids were like, "Cock smoker?  Nobody says cock smoker?"  Guess what the most popular swear was for the following year.  That's right.  

Maybe the UCI is run by a bunch of cock smokers after all.

 Glaciers are cool, literally.  Holding this little chunk was a lifelong dream.  My own pet glacier.