About eleven days ago I had a minor crash on my new bike (the acquisition of said bike remains to be blogged). Fortunately, my bike came out of it with just a few small scratches. That’s because my body cushioned its landing.
I got the standard hip contusion with the attractive purple and yellow bruise that rose to the surface after about a week. The worst damage, though was suffered by my forearm.
Although I was descending at a safe speed and being very careful in the corners, I crashed when I came around a sharp turn and ran over some rocks that had fallen from the hillside and rolled out into the road. My front wheel caught the outside edge of one of the rocks and twisted out from under me. My right forearm came down on and then ground across a rock, carving a small trench out of and a hole into my arm just below the elbow.
Fortunately, I was near the end of a two and a half hour ride with friends, so they followed me the remaining mile or so down the hill to make sure I could make it home. Still, I was hating life, specifically the part where wind blows past an open wound.
I was lucky that my wife was home, so I got help cleaning and bandaging the wound. My nerve endings were already on full alert, so thoroughly cleaning out the dirt and rocks didn’t really increase the pain much. Maybe going from an 8 to a 9. My doctor took a look at it the next day and said I did a good job of cleaning it up.
I’m on vacation now and just visited with my mother for a couple of days. She’s a nurse, so she did a good job of redoing the bandages and making sure my arm was healing. While cleaning it last night with hydrogen peroxide, she found two little rocks that I had been smuggling across state lines. The rocks had been ground in so deep into my arm that it took eleven days for them to come up to the surface.
Of course, when you tell people stories like this, you open yourself up to hearing their stories about bits of glass, ammunition, etc. taking years to come to the surface. But that’s okay. It’s not like I don’t do the same.