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Scalpel… clamps… scr– Where’s the screwdriver?!

Looking back through the archives, it took me about two weeks before I wrote about what happened the last time I had knee surgery. Yes, the last time I had it: this was Operation #2. I played soccer for a couple months in there, but I’m off the field for a while again. How long? Well, it’ll be a lot less than last time.

Now that I think about it, this has been a really long process. If not for insurance reasons, I could have set the surgery date for October 7th. Maybe I’ll go back to all of that in a later entry, but for now, I promised a bunch of people that I’d let them know how surgery went.

Surgery was scheduled for 11:00, so I got to sleep past 8:00—when I woke up, I was still really tired and thought about resetting my alarm for a couple hours later. It was a long weekend and I was planning on plenty of rest and recovery given my current lack-of-schedule, so why the hell would I wake up so early if I didn’t need to? It took me a moment to remember that yes, I needed to.

Things started out swimmingly when I got to the front desk to check in and the woman there asked me for two things: my driver’s license and insurance card. The problem was that I followed the instructions to leave all of my valuables at home. Among those valuables: my wallet, which contained my driver’s license and insurance card. Mom and Dad had driven me to the hospital and Mom offered to drive back to the house, but since all of my information was in the system (they got it from my pre-surgery physical two weeks earlier), they let it slide. Off to a great start, right?

Thankfully, that was pretty much the only hitch of the morning. They brought me back to my room, I put on my gown and long purple “Bair Paws” socks, laid back, got a needle stuck in the back of my hand, talked with my parents for a while… no big deal.

Actually, I guess there was sort of a hitch in there, but it was a physical hitch: the nurse was having some trouble shaving my knee. She carries a shaver with her and each room has a shaver head attached to a holder on the wall. She snapped them together, turned it on, dragged it up my leg and didn’t accomplish much. (For those who haven’t seen them, my legs are kinda hairy.) It felt like she was tugging on the hair more than cutting it, which wasn’t really pleasant. The next pass, she moved much more slowly and MAGIC! The shaver started working properly! My leg hair was grateful.

Dr. Lewis came in soon after—the same doctor who did my ACL replacement surgery—for a quick consultation and I told him about some pains I’d been having in my shin recently. I first noticed it when I’d been riding an exercise bike, but it sprung up the day before as well during a long car ride. The spot was about two inches below the kneecap on the left side of my shin. He was feeling around with his thumb while we talked, then found a spot and started pressing down on it. Apparently, that’s where he put the tibial screw when attaching the new ACL. I don’t know if it was coming loose or just sticking out a little and causing irritation, but it’s kind of a moot point, seeing as how the screw is currently located in a sterile plastic bag on a table across the room.

Soon after that, I was wondering why I could hear so many people making so much noise before my operation started. It was because the operation was over and I was in the recovery room. Things were pretty fuzzy for a while after that and I’ve double-checked with my parents about what happened between unconsciousness and leaving the hospital a few hours later.

As previously mentioned, the surgery was scheduled for 11:00. Dr. Lewis was talking to my parents in the waiting room by 11:20. Needless to say, everything went smoothly. “Everything” ended up being more than we thought it might be, but MRI scans apparently don’t always show everything that’s going on.

Just as a quick aside, when I went in for my first consultation with Dr. Lewis in September because of the problems with the back of my knee, he gave me three options: 1) go back to playing soccer and see what happens; 2) get a cortisone shot; or 3) have a scope done and see what we find. I opted for 1 and 3: I played soccer for a couple weeks without any problems, but I’m definitely glad I decided to have surgery as well.

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Craaaaazy is the chaaaaampion, my frieeeeends…

Checkpoint Tracker has been an adventure race points-rated system for… well, I’m not sure how long it’s been around. For each race a team entered, they could win a certain number of points for their final position: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Lotus, Cat, the Intertwined Hibiscus, etc. (You’d be amazed at how many points you get for that last one.) At the end of the adventure racing season, each team that reaches 500 points gets covered with awesomesauce. (You’d be amazed at how much awesomesauce you get from that last one.)

Last year, though, Checkpoint Tracker added a twist: their own National Championship. Previously, there was USARA (United States Adventure Racing Association). Then there were two, which gave teams two chances to earn bragging rights as national adventure racing champions. Sure, it’s odd, but getting 500 points last year is what allowed WEDALI to compete in the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge, so why knock the system?

Another reason not to knock the system is because WEDALI only finished third in USARA nationals this year (the fact that I’m writing “only” seems really cool and really sad at the same time), but they redeemed themselves valiantly by kicking some major ass in the National Checkpoint Tracker Championship race over the weekend. I could have posted this right away, but I wanted to save the link to the website and the picture that reflects their bad-assery until the very end.

So congrats to my little brother Justin and all of his WEDALI teammates for smoking the competition and… no comments about the awesomesauce this time—it seems inappropriate since they came in first.

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A good way to end the streak

Which isn’t saying much, seeing as how “the streak” is “playing a soccer game on Sunday for four straight weeks.” When I’ll be playing again, I dunno—I’ll be in Chicago next Sunday and going in for surgery the next day. How long that’ll keep me off the field… each injury has varied, so I’m not going to speculate. Suffice it to say that I’m glad that my last game for a while was this one.

It certainly helps that the final score was 4-0, but I felt like I was back to my old self. Sorta. I was panting and wheezing and my chest hurt when I would come off the field, but aside from the lack of endurance, it was good. I was back to playing sweeper—center defender—where I played for years before my knee made it hard to make sharp twists and turns. Today, no such concerns.

I felt comfortable, I felt confident, I enjoyed yelling at my teammates… it was usually about players from the other team who were standing wide open, so one time they were standing around on their own and I started yelling… it was our free kick, so it didn’t matter where they were standing. Oops. (In my defense, when the referee blew the whistle for a hand ball, he pointed toward our end of the field.)

I made some little mistakes here and there, but overall, I’m happy. And now soccer is going to be in the taillights for a little while, but if this was my send-off game or my birthday game or whatever you want to call it… if this was the last one for a few days/weeks/months, I’m okay with that. Which doesn’t change the fact that I’ll keep going to games (even if I’m on crutches) so I can yell at my teammates from the sidelines.

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Purchased due to a midlife crisis?

I was driving to school yesterday and pulled up behind a flashy looking Audi at a stoplight. (I don’t know what style it was, but suffice it to say the car was flashy.) Why do I think it’s a midlife crisis purchase, you ask? After all, most guys I know talk about getting a Ferrari, a Porsche, a Lamborghini, etc. One of those generic “I don’t really know what’s special about it, but it’s expensive and looks cool” cars.

The reason I think the Audi was a midlife crisis purchase was because of the license plate. As I pulled up behind it at the stoplight, I saw its personalized plate: ACT 2.

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Another year closer to the grave

Unless I have myself cremated, in which case I’m closer to… wherever I have my remains dumped. (Preferably not on my parents’ carpet.)

Being 35 doesn’t feel like a very special age, but at the moment, it does feels like the starting line to a very speedy race. I’ve got two online exams to take by 11:55 tonight, class tomorrow night, dinner with friends on Friday, a request/offer from a friend to help behind the scenes on a movie over the weekend, the rest of the week to prepare for and take another two online exams and then the final exam on Thursday the 27th, getting on a bus to Chicago at 12:05am on Friday, having fun at HalloweeM with a bunch of Mensa folks (See how they made that letter switch? Pretty clever, huh?), then coming home on Sunday just in time for arthroscopic knee surgery on Monday morning.

There are a lot of unknowns in there, mostly about whether I’ll be prepared for the exams and what (if anything) the surgeon will find when scoping my knee. I’ve played soccer a couple times since talking to the doc—he said it was one of my three options, so why not?—and I haven’t collapsed screaming in pain, so that’s been nice. I can also tell there’s something in the back that still doesn’t feel right, which is not so nice.

So yeah, that’s the next two weeks summed up in one long run-on sentence and I’m glad I could type it all out. Had I tried to say it instead, I might have run out of oxygen and been a lot less than one year closer to the grave.

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They’re advertising WHAT in the Yellow Pages?!

This came out of Verizon’s “superpages”—an alternative to the Yellow Pages that covers three cities—so maybe that’s why they didn’t bother to think about the potential shock that people might suffer if they started randomly flipping through the book.

It had some general information about each city in the first couple pages, then went through the business listings on white pages with a gray bar on the side. Those names are in alphabetical order, whereas the yellow pages are divided into fields of business that also include some advertisements (e.g., the list of Attorneys from pages 25 through 38). It’s easy to find the categories on each page because the upper corner shows what’s included: page 214 covers “Physicians—Pipe.” If what you’re looking for fits within that spread of the alphabet, that’s the page you need to check out.

So I looked at page 1. The first word at the top ([blank]—[blank]) was “Abortion.” It clarified lower on the page that the category was actually “abortion alternatives” and wasn’t advertising abortion services or abortion referrals, but just looking at the top… wow. Now I’m afraid to look through the book anymore because I might find something like a listing on page 214 for a physician who specializes in “abortion alternative alternatives.”