I WON A FREAKIN KAYAK!!!

ON my birthday! For more details email me; here are some pics. I LOVE it & can't wait to hit some whitewater in it.

Concussed...

So, yeah, basically, concussions suck.

Never having had one before, I am profoundly amazed and have a great new understanding of how important my brain is. Not that the grasp of cranial function as a necessary element to…umm…well…life…is beyond me, but I never really knew, as I think most of us (neurosurgeons, ER technicians, PAs, nurses and the like exempted) probably never really know, just how important that grey matter is until we mess with it. Or rather, have to cope with someone else messing with it, specifically a pro or weekend-warrior (“wannabe”) riding East on the Goose Creek Trail just east of the underpass at 28^th near Valmont, where aforementioned nameless asshole tried to kill me, then yelled at me, then took off, leaving me completely shocked and totally unprepared for what I was about to deal with. (If you are that asshole and reading this somehow jump-starts some feeling of morose sorrow for what you’ve put me thru please, by all means, contact me.)

By the time I got to the park for our team-building activity, it was clear that things were not okay. My vision was blurring, my head was killing me (high impact collision with a bicycle helmet’ll do that), and I was really, really, really nauseous. I could barely make my way around the field and finally one of my supervisors took me to the nearby hospital, where a CT scan revealed no broken bones but the severe swelling of my cro-magnon looking forehead and bridge of my nose, as well as my relative lack of coherence and general dysfunctionalism (beyond the norm, friends and fam; I was in pretty bad shape) revealed I had a moderate concussion. Left with a ton of morphine in my system and no easy way home, I was dialing my friend Bryce to see if he could come and give me a lift when the same supervisor, Dawn, came to pick me up, drove me to get my prescription, drove me to a convenience store, then drove me home, schlepped (with the help of another wonderful colleague) my bike and pack up three flights of stairs to my apartment, and after I thanked them a zillion times, took off. My friend Mike came down from Longmont to spend the night with me despite a 6am catering shift for him the next day. So far the Whole Foods job is working out beautifully; Mike, Dawn and my other colleague who helped me that night (whose name I am not remembering due to my head injury) as well as everyone I’ve seen since have been wonderfully accommodating and have gone way out of their way to make sure I’m healing. What wonderful colleagues to have. Special kudos for Mike for working the catering shift AND then having to go to his PT job; there is a place in heaven for that man, to say the least, for staying up with me (as I was terrified of sleeping for fear of not waking up) and keeping my life interesting throughout the night. It was definitely an interesting night.

Since then I took the next day off of work; tired, miserable and incapable of focusing on anything really without seeing double I spent the whole day sleeping, crying, and taking the pain meds that the ER doc gave me. Friday morning I felt better and tried to go to work; “tried” being the operative word as I worked about half my shift and then was forced to go home by persistent nausea and headache. With no end in sight, I resolved to let my body heal, rest and ice and do whatever I needed to that would help, and try to stay as calm as possible.

It’s Saturday evening now and I am feeling much better, though am glad that I am not working again until Monday evening because I’ll be rock star-quality by the time I get back to slinging groceries, which is exactly what I want to show my new employer. So the moral of the story is: rest. rest. rest. Even when you can feel the calories adding millimeters to centimeters to inches around your waistline because you aren’t working out, rest. You can’t speed recovery of a brain injury, and trying to do so just makes things worse. Keep an eye out on the bike paths and if you see an bum jerk ridnig around Boulder on aerobars only with a blue helmet, white-blue-red-and-black kit, a terrible attitude, and a really nice red roadbike, tackle him and get his info for me, would you? There’s a $1500 hospital bill I’d like to send his way…

Thanks for reading.

-Dondi