Monday, August 21, 2006
Techical difficulties and what health insurance is good for
OK, my blog is way behind but I blame the good folks at blogger, whose brilliant software has spanned two browsers to keep me from posting photos. In the meantime, for the second time in a couple months I spent the bulk of my off-day in the emergency room, although this time it was way cooler than heat exhaustion.
I was mountain biking and, while dropping down a dip in the trail, my foot slipped off my metal pedal and the pedal hit my calf hard.
"Gee," I thought. "That probably left a mark." Not thinking much of it I glanced at my leg to see buckets of blood pouring from a gaping wound in my calf and pooling in my shoe. The loosely hanging flesh and quickly draining blood told me that maybe it was time to head to the emergency room.
After thinking better of driving myself (passing out at the wheel is frowned upon), I called Bones, who was only a few blocks away and pedaled over to her house to catch a ride to the ER. After bleeding on her car for a few minutes and woozily giving her the wrong directions to the hospital, I made it to the ER where a bored-looking receptionist, without looking at my cut, told me to sit down and wait.
So I sat and bled for a while longer, before a nurse finally checked out my injury and took me to a room. There a parade of nurses looked at my cut, recoiled, and left without doing much (though they were very prompt about getting my insurance information).
Finally a doctor came in and examined my cut. She was suitably impressed.
"What's that blue stuff?" Anna asked.
"That's the fascia. It covers the muscle."
I had managed to cut my leg down to the muscle in a jagged 10 cm smiley face (photos to come) but just avoided damaging the muscle, which may have been one surgery and several thousand dollard worse.
Ironically, the most painful part of the whole ordeal was getting the medicine to dull the pain. The doctor gave me a local anesthetic by way of eight shots directly into the cut. Eight swift kicks to the junk would have felt much better.
Then she shot a cleaning solution through the wound and eventually sewed me up with 16 stitches, gave me a tetanus shot (It included a whooping cough vaccine. Twofer!) and sent me hobbling on my way.
Now I can show off my awesome scar and tell everybody who doesn't read my blog about the time I fought off an attacking cougar.
I was mountain biking and, while dropping down a dip in the trail, my foot slipped off my metal pedal and the pedal hit my calf hard.
"Gee," I thought. "That probably left a mark." Not thinking much of it I glanced at my leg to see buckets of blood pouring from a gaping wound in my calf and pooling in my shoe. The loosely hanging flesh and quickly draining blood told me that maybe it was time to head to the emergency room.
After thinking better of driving myself (passing out at the wheel is frowned upon), I called Bones, who was only a few blocks away and pedaled over to her house to catch a ride to the ER. After bleeding on her car for a few minutes and woozily giving her the wrong directions to the hospital, I made it to the ER where a bored-looking receptionist, without looking at my cut, told me to sit down and wait.
So I sat and bled for a while longer, before a nurse finally checked out my injury and took me to a room. There a parade of nurses looked at my cut, recoiled, and left without doing much (though they were very prompt about getting my insurance information).
Finally a doctor came in and examined my cut. She was suitably impressed.
"What's that blue stuff?" Anna asked.
"That's the fascia. It covers the muscle."
I had managed to cut my leg down to the muscle in a jagged 10 cm smiley face (photos to come) but just avoided damaging the muscle, which may have been one surgery and several thousand dollard worse.
Ironically, the most painful part of the whole ordeal was getting the medicine to dull the pain. The doctor gave me a local anesthetic by way of eight shots directly into the cut. Eight swift kicks to the junk would have felt much better.
Then she shot a cleaning solution through the wound and eventually sewed me up with 16 stitches, gave me a tetanus shot (It included a whooping cough vaccine. Twofer!) and sent me hobbling on my way.
Now I can show off my awesome scar and tell everybody who doesn't read my blog about the time I fought off an attacking cougar.
# posted by Druz @ 2:14 PM 
