Accidental Education

“You don’t learn anything from a working system.”

The last six weeks have been quite an adventure. Definitely, the start of it was pretty sucky, but even then I couldn’t help being fascinated and curious. Not something I’d wish on anyone I liked, but a lot of interesting stuff came out of it.

About a week before Thanksgiving, I broke my collarbone in a bicycle accident. I’ve never broken a bone before. The break was relatively mild, toward the shoulder end of the bone, rather than in the middle; little displacement. Still, it put my arm out of commission. Oh, and it hurt a lot.

The first interesting point is that I have literally no memory of the accident itself. I was biking home from dinner with friends, through quiet back streets in Arlington along a familiar route. My next memory is of lying in the street, thinking that I really needed to get up and go home. “No, you can’t have five more minutes.”

Everything after that was little flashes of consciousness, like when a noise wakes you in the middle of the night and you go right back to sleep. Some deep reptile part of my brain was running the show, only waking me up when it needed higher brain functions. I remember checking that I had my backpack and all my stuff. I remember trying to figure out why my back wheel wasn’t turning smoothly. (It later turned out that the axle had been knocked out of its socket; apparently, I wasn’t up to diagnosing even that.) I remember giving lizard brain directions: Go to the end of the block, turn left on the bike path, then right at the light. Then I don’t remember anything until I got home maybe an hour later (more on that in a bit). Lizard brain woke me up to work the keys; I think it shut off the bike lights by itself. This is the kind of experience that makes people go into neuroscience.

One lesson here is that I am not a Tough Guy. Y’know in action movies, when the hero gets shot, or gets his arm broken or something, and he just grunts and grits his teeth and keeps going? So not me. Give me a minor bone break, and I lose all capacity for rational thought and just want to find my way back to my burrow. A bit disheartening, but it’s probably good to know that about yourself.

I came to as I was walking up the basement stairs. I woke up Nadra, and she took me to the ER. It was a quiet night, so they saw me right away. X-rays of course, plus EKG and blood work. Unconsciousness and loss of memory means you also get run through the CT scanner. Aside from the clavicle, everything came back fine. It wasn’t bad enough to need surgery and pins and all that, but short of that, there’s not much they can do. I needed to keep it immobilized, so they put my arm in a sling, gave me a couple of Vicodin, and sent me home.

I’ve been able to piece together part of the story from physical evidence: Broken left clavicle, scrapes and bruises on left shoulder and upper back. Bike helmet shows signs of impact above left temple, and is cracked through the rim below that. (I’ll stop whining about having to wear it now.) Weirdly, middle finger of right hand was bruised and swollen, with a scrape on the inside of one joint. No other injuries. Seems pretty clear that I went forward over the handlebars and tried to roll, fairly unsuccessfully.

I went back to the scene in daylight, and there was a patched section of road with about an inch of lip on it. That seems the likeliest explanation for the crash. I think I would have remembered if there had been a car or people or animals around, and there was nobody there when I woke up. The docs pretty much ruled out the scary possibility: that I’d blacked out while riding. Apparently, some memory loss is common when you take a solid blow to the head.

The biggest mystery is how long I was out for. The accident must have happened a little before 9pm, and I didn’t get home until 10:30. Normally that walk would only have taken about half an hour. Even injured and pushing the bike, I don’t think I could have taken more than an hour, so I may have been out for a bit. It was one of those streets that has almost no traffic, so I could have lain there for a while without anyone noticing.

Recovery

A broken clavicle imposes some odd limitations. My arm was in a sling, but I could still move my hand. It couldn’t bear any weight, but I could type. My right arm was fine, and I had no trouble walking. I had to be careful not to jostle my arm, and I could not afford to trip: If I fell the wrong way, I wouldn’t be able to catch myself, and I’d land on my bad arm.

My world broke down into three categories: Things you normally do one-handed, which I had no problem with; things that absolutely require two hands, which I couldn’t do at all; and things that you normally use two hands for, but you can do awkwardly with one. Pretty much anything involving fabric is Category Three. I got to bend the rules a little since I could use my left hand some (mostly for buttoning pants).

Since I could walk and type, I showed up at work the next day. I scored a ton of karma and got my work handed off to various folks. This was Wednesday, and we were flying out to Minnesota on Friday, so I took the next couple days off. The flight went fine; to minimize the carry-on we’d have to wrestle with, we threw most of our stuff in one big suitcase and checked it. Fortunately, Thanksgiving in Minnesota is a pretty low-key vacation, so I got to lie around and recuperate for a week and a half.

When I was about sixteen I developed an allergy to milk. Not lactose intolerance, but a flat-out allergy. Not life-threatening, but enough to keep me from drinking it. Sometime in my early thirties, it started fading (to be replaced with pollen allergies - joy). I wasn’t really allergic anymore, but milk still tasted weird, so I never got back into it.

It occurred to me, as I was lounging around in Minneapolis, that I’ve got bone to knit, and maybe I should give it a try. So I had my first glass of milk in nearly thirty years, and my body was like, “OMG! This is the best stuff ever!” It tasted fantastic. For the next few weeks, I was pounding the stuff down, having three or four glasses a day. But then, even more strangely, at about the point that I noticed that bone had stopped being quite so sensitive, milk stopped tasting quite as good. I mean, it’s still tasty, and I still drink it, but that craving went away. It seems that your body really does use flavor to manipulate your nutrient intake, and it’s constantly tuning that feedback.

Again, this is a fairly mild break, as breaks go, so the healing process was pretty fast. For the first few weeks, it was like a game where I got to level-up every couple days. “Achievement unlocked! You can now tie your shoelaces!” That was actually one of the more recent ones. Tying your shoelaces involves holding your arms straight out in front of you and pulling straight out to the side. That puts pressure on your clavicle in a weirdly specific way. For a couple weeks, I could carry a sack of groceries in my left hand, but I had to wear slip-on shoes.

There are all these things like that which you do every day and never think about the mechanics of them, and then something like this happens, and you suddenly realize how you do them because you can’t anymore. If you want to put on a t-shirt without raising one shoulder, you have to do it differently. (Slide the left arm in up to the shoulder; grab the hem below the right sleeve and stretch it over your head. Don’t let the fabric bunch. Pull it down over your body with the right arm inside; wriggle it out through the sleeve.) Note that this procedure is not reversible. Until I healed enough to move my shoulder, I had to get someone to help me take my t-shirt off.

As of this writing, I’ve got most of my mobility back. I’m still weak or limited in some motions. Doc said it should take about three months to heal fully, and I’m about half-way there. I haven’t gotten back on my bike yet, but hopefully soon. All of my doctors were emphatic that I not let this scare me off riding, even at night. (The night shift ER doc bikes to work.)

Long-term, I hope this actually motivates me to get in better shape. Maybe some weight training would strengthen my bones and give me a little more padding. Being a bit more limber would probably help, too.

Long-long-term, this has given me a bit of insight into what it’ll be like when I get old. Like I said, I had to move a bit more slowly and carefully, but I could still do most things myself. Nobody likes to feel helpless, so it’s annoying when people do things for you that you can do yourself. It’s also frustrating to have to ask for help with stupid things like tying your shoelaces or taking off a shirt. No wonder old people are so cranky.

So yes, it’s been painful and inconvenient; and yes, I know I was lucky. With a bad break, that’s more debilitating and heals slowly, it would have been a lot harder to see any silver lining. But all that aside, it’s been profoundly educational. Besides, I’ve got a CD full of pictures of the inside of my body. How cool is that? (Best screensaver ever.) I’d have dodged this whole experience if I could have, but I can at least feel that I learned something in return.