Drama Trauma

Chapter 1:  PRP, the future is now.
So in my attempt to avoid season ending shoulder surgery, I opted for Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) Therapy to repair my torn rotator cuff. Faster recovery, less pain, and just as good or better recovery rate, what's not to like. I found a place with the recommendation of friends and finally got in. Scheduling an overnight road trip with a 3 month old added complexity to the trip, but baby RC was a trouper and we made it across Missouri. The next day we woke up, had some breakfast and headed to the clinic bright and early. Filled out paperwork and was ushered into the room at 8am. Chat with the nurse and doctor, and they offered to inject my knee too. Awesome! It has been a 25 year problem for me with knee replacement as the only proven prognosis. So I have been waiting on the high tech treatments, like spray foam injection or something. If this works, I may not be able to run marathons, but hopefully I will be able to jog farther than across the street without paying for it. "Yes, please!" Blood was drawn from my arm, then rolled me over and jabbed me with railroad spikes to take marrow from my hip and some fat cells from my muffin top. The juices were filtered and sprinkled with magic grow dust in preparation for reinsertion. Then guided with a sonogram the parts were injected, 4 times in the shoulder and just once in the knee. With local anesthesia, pain was at most a moderate discomfort, most so in my shoulder, as the deeper and more intricate joint, I think. In and out in 2 hours, sent on my way with post care directions and a script for pain, which was filled with our first stop! Lunch and a 4 hour car ride as my shoulder starts stiffening up, half way home I take the hydrocodone/apap, but is didnt seem to have really any effect. Oh well, we made it home, with less whining from the baby than me.

Chapter 2:  to ER is human.
Upon getting home, I let Xan unload the car and I got the mail and cooled off. When I took my shirt off, I realized I had bled though one of the patches on my back and stained my nice new seersucker shirt. We sat down on the bench in the dining room to change the dressing on my back. Xan got the first one done and was cleaning up the mess on the second when I started to feel woozy. I tried to hold on while she finished the second then the next thing I know I am looking up at a concerned looking wife talking on the phone. First thing I said was, "I'm OK." Evidently I passed out, falling backwards against her hitting my head on the hardwood table before getting laid on the bench. Unable to detect breathing or pulse, she punched my chest a couple times, then grabber her phone and called 911. Firemen then EMT's showed up as I was still trying to regain my wits and hooked me up to various monitors and cuffs. I tried to sit up, but soon felt woozy and my extremities where tingling almost painfully and had to lay back down. The crew had to rearrange the living room to get the stretcher in, so when asked if I wanted to go to the hospital I agreed. With the medical bills already paid this year we have got to be close to our out of pocket max with insurance, and I have never ridden in an ambulance, and Xan wouldn't have let me not go, better safe than sorry... they loaded me up and away we went. Xan grabbed a shirt and, unsure if I had any pants on, a pair of shorts, as well as the baby and met me at the emergency room. It was a busy day in the ER, as I think they all are so it took a while. But a couple liters of saline, a blood draw and umpteen probes and feet of tape stuck to hair, a head CT, an EKG, 5 diaper changes and 6 hours I was declared healthy. Some vasovagal episode, not sure of the trigger, dehydration, stress, pain, sitting... well, hope it doesn't happen again, I don't think Xan liked it very much.
I am taking it easy today, this blog will be the most effort I will put out today. Hydration, medication and staying cool are my goals.

It's Just a Flesh Wound...

Not that it explains any of my oddness, but I was once shot in the head. It was a friendly fire incident, the worst of all reasons to get shot. It was Easter of 1982, I think, and the emergency room was quiet compared to many of the other times I visited there. They saved the projectile that they dug out of my skull for me in one of those urine sample jars, which is now labeled and lost among the boxes and drawers of memories. I was so lucky…

My friend Adam lived in KC with his dad during the week and came out to his mom’s on weekends. We would pal around, hiking, hunting, camping, stalking, mini-biking and all that other fun stuff on the quarter section of wooded hillside between our houses. We build hay forts and tree stands and hydro-engineering projects in the ditch just for the fun of it. Anything we could figure out to do with firecrackers, we did. He brought some bottle rockets from home and we would take turns shooting at each other as we zipped by on the mini-bike. Being the young engineer I was, I made a launcher with a flag pole, capped at one end, a hole cut to light the fuse, and a tennis ball can as a flash suppressor, which gave the game some surprisingly close calls. But it was all harmless.

You might be thinking 1982, what were you doing with a firearm? But I was living “in the country”, a couple miles outside of town where boys and guns went together like, well, boys and guns! And our arsenal was comprised of pellet and BB guns, hardly lethal, at least to boys. Now pigeons and grasshoppers might fall prey to the mighty guns every now and then, a squirrel once and a lot of cans, but nothing much bigger than a shoe. This particular spring, we had gone down to the pond to shoot (at) frogs. I had left the nice .22 caliber pellet gun at the house, preferring the cheaper ammo of BB guns. The drawback of BB’s are their accuracy, saving the lives of countless critters. When we ran out of BB’s, we tried hunting them down with pocket knives, and when that fun wore off, we started to trudge back home, me in the lead. Adam had a CO2 powered BB pistol, with a 50 or so shot reservoir for BB’s, and you could shake and hear the rattle of your remaining shots. Well, since we had long exhausted our ammo, firearm discipline had lapsed, and for no reason that anyone can explain, Adam took aim at me from 30 feet or so and pulled the trigger. Hey, it was empty, right? Well that puff of compressed air pushed the real last BB out of the chamber on a trajectory towards me. Continuing in the series of unlikely events, the .177 caliber slug, travelling at hundreds of feet per second, founds it make, me, striking me in the back of the head, several inches behind my ear! I thought I had been stung by a wasp, and flinched, bringing my hand up to my head as I turned around. The shocked look on Adam’s face (and the gun pointed at me) quickly informed me to what had happened. Not content with giving me a welt or just a small flesh wound, the BB pierced my skin and imbedded itself between my scalp and skull a good inch from the entry point. I told Adam not to worry, I would tell the parents that it was a ricochet, so he wouldn’t get in (too much) trouble, and turned and ran the rest of the way back to my house, where I told my mom I was shot. Shocked, she cleaned up the blood, scalp wounds are bleeders, to find a tiny hole and a bump, and after tying for several minutes to move the BB back to the hole, decided this might be best left to the professionals, and loaded me up in the car and we headed to the Emergency Room. There, after a requisite wait, a local was injected and a small X was cut to remove the BB. And continuing the cover up, I had to get a tetanus shot (since it had bounced off the ground). After returning home, I found Adam waiting on the back porch with his mom, and a large basket of Easter apology candy.

Well, it sits in a plastic jar labeled “The BB that got me, Easter ‘82” and is packed away somewhere next to the chunks of cartilage from my first knee surgery, a reminder of how lucky I was.