how you like yo’ ribs?
I don’t know what the deal is, but the past 9-12 months have not been happy ones for Chewy’s ribcage. Let me elaborate…
To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m going to be starting with Incident #1 or #2, but sometime in November of ’08, I did something to crack a rib. It’s been a while now, and I don’t remember the specific incident, but I don’t think it happened due to a bike crash. In fact I think I tripped on something in the dark here in my room, and hit the deck, my chest-cavity bouncing off of something on the way down. The point here being that when I went up to AK for the month of December, I clearly remember having some decent rib pains for the first week or so. I’ve cracked ribs before, so I know what it’s like and I also know that they don’t really do anything about it…you just have to hope you don’t cough, sneeze or hiccup until it heals. So that was my Winter ’09 Juneau trip. Kinda…
The last night that I was up there, Zeno and Aaron and I tore it up pretty good. When we got here to my place, I realized that I’d done something awesome to some ribs in a different spot. Imagine how excited I was to know that it would a couple more weeks of hoping I wouldn’t cough, sneeze or hiccup while a different rib, or ribs, healed up in its/their own sweet time.
Fast forward to the past! Specifically, in fact, one week ago, roughly. Thursday evening. Not last Thursday, but a week prior. WHATEVER!!! RECENTLY…I had reason to be riding my bike home from a buddy’s house. I’d decided to take a different route to get there and so I was returning along the same route, as it took me through more residential neighborhoods, and less along motor vehicle arterials. In other words, I deemed it to be a safer route. Along the way I came into a cul-de-sac that had recently been re-surfaced with chip-seal. As I turned into the cul-de-sac from the sidewalk, I was leaned into the corner, and having been freshly-applied, the surface was not unlike a basketball court covered with marbles. Marbles that turned into jacks once I went horizontal and hit the deck full-force on my side. Normally when you hit the deck on pavement, you slide. That sliding action actually deflects some of the impact of hitting the deck. I didn’t slide very far. And it hurt when I went down. Okay, so there’s that. Now I have a bruise on my side and scabs on my leg, and my forearm looks like I tried to pick a fight with Wolverine. My upper arm, however, looks kinda cool. All the little pebbles scratched me up in multiple deep, short slashes that look like I got a tattoo of a meteor shower. YIPPEE!!!
But the point of this long-winded post is that guess what? Yep, the ribs on the right side have been on a slow burn ever since then. And guess what else? Yep, I sneezed today. But this wasn’t just a normal sneeze, this one was one of those ones where the entire system was sealed up airtight, so my lungs, and therefore my chest (i.e., my ribs) took the full force of the blast.
DAMMIT, that hurt!
I’ll just end by saying that injuring your ribs sucks.
Toodles!
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