Racing

I've had the helmet sitting by my desk since I got it back from the Isle of Man in August. It's good for nothing except being a flower pot nowadays, but I thought I might put a couple of pictures up here first.

The crack through the chin piece probably explains how I broke my jaw.

Not too pretty, eh?

So, in the bin with that, then.

Sorry guys, but I've had to disable comments on this blog, as I was getting hit with a few dozen spam additions every day. God knows what they think they would achieve, adding junk URLs to comments here - do you think people would ever follow those links?

Anyway, sorry, but if you want to get in touch, then please email me, using neal@ my domain.

Yesterday I removed the dressings, and treated myself to a proper shower, and then went to physio. My physio was pretty pleased with the way the incisions have all healed, and gave me a bunch of exercises to do to improve the range of movement I have, with the warning that I 'shouldn't over do it'.

I also told her of the old line 'pain fades, glory lasts for ever, chicks dig scars'. She looked at my scars and suggested that chicks might in fact run screaming from the room. Perhaps I have overdone it a bit - judge for yourselves:

Yesterday I went in for some more x-rays, and to have the 'staples' removed (they use staples rather than stiches nowadays). The nurse said she'd never removed so many in one go before, so she counted them - 73 in total. Some of them came out with hardly any sensation at all, others really made me yelp a bit.

As for the x-rays - well, things look different, but, to my layman's eyes, not that much better. But the consultant explained to me that the bone graft material hardly shows up in the x-ray, just as a bit of grey shadow, as it's a lot less dense than the femur itself. Comparing with the previous x-ray, the gaps are smaller, and there is a load of graft 'shadow' in places.

You can also see the row of staples along my thigh!

The pic from the other angle is here

Anyway, the surgeon is happy enough, and the next x-ray is in 8 weeks. This will be the really important one, I think...

I was discharged from the hospital at lunchtime today.

The surgeon is very pleased with the way the operation went, and if he's pleased, I'm pleased. It took a fair bit longer than expected - about 5 hours! Part of the problem, apparently, was removing the previous 'nail' (the piece of metal running the length of my femur, holding my knee the right distance from my hip) - this, when they finally got it out, was found to be a bit bent. On hearing this I apologised to the surgeon, cos it meant I'd put too much weight on it, but he said not to worry as everyone does it. Hmmm. But the xrays on Monday looked good too, so everything bodes well for a successful outcome.

Post-op recovery was a bit up and down - the day after I felt really fine, but the day after that I felt lousy as the morphine had bunged up my digestive system. But then I came off the morphine, and with some other drugs to get me 'going again', I settled ok. Amazingly, I was out of bed and on my feet the day after the op, if only to travel from bed to chair, and two days later I was moving around on crutches, albeit considerably slower than I was a week ago. Yesterday I was well enough to be given an afternoon pass to attend the funeral of a schoolfriend, and, while it tired me out a bit, it was obvious I was ok to be discharged.

Anyway, enough of the purple prose, how about some pictures! The one I have is a little gruesome, so click here if you dare. I think it looks like something out of a Boris Karloff movie.