healing

Yesterday I received my first visitor--my friend Emily came to keep me company while my partner was at work. It was nice to catch up, and I finally felt presentable enough to see people. The scrapes on my nose and forehead are almost healed. The upper lip and chin still look a little rough, by my beard has grown long enough to hide it, mostly. I seem to have some numbness on my lower lip and chin--probably nerve damage. I've also been seeing a chiropractor for my headaches, and he tells me that my top-most vertebrae (C1 and C2, which connect to my skull) are slightly knocked out of place. It's a big relief to get adjusted. I still don't sleep all that well at night, partly due to headaches and partly due to a bunch of canker sores in my mouth. Even my uvula has a canker sore on it, and it's swollen to double its size...yuck.
At any rate, I'm looking and feeling a lot better, but still sleeping a ton.
Thanks to everyone for the good thoughts and healing energy!

If you want to read a slightly gruesome account of my injuries, read below. Otherwise, don't read further.


I think I landed first just below my nose, which pushed it up and dragged my top lip down, creating a tear running across the bottom of my nose and down almost to my lip. It didn't completely sever my lip. My lower lip was dragged down and back, tearing it away from the gumline down to a nerve that runs along the bottom of my chin. This was kind of cool: the surgeon said he had just finished sewing up a surgical incision that looked really similar...so in other words, I effectively ripped my lip--with surgical precision--down to expose a nerve, without actually damaging that nerve! I also managed to pack that incision with large amounts of sand, gravel, and dirt. I also tore my chin open in about an inch-long upside-down U-shape. I scraped most of the skin off the center of my nose, running up to my forehead, and one of the nosepieces twisted up and gouged a chunk out of between my eyebrows.
I also got a variety of scrapes on my elbows and knees, and a fair amount of gravel embedded in my right hand.
And--remarkably--for going 15-20 mph (I think), that's really all that happened.

faceplant fix-up recipes

Since so many people have been sweet to me with my injuries, I wanted to post a couple recipes that were helpful for me. So if you get face injuries and have to drink through a straw, here are some helpful recipes. Or even if you decide to go on a liquid diet, they work too!

Ensure-type drinks make great stomach-fillers for when you have to get up to take vicodin and antibiotics in the middle of the night.
Matt & Claire bought some really great smoothies, including one that had some kind of fancy probiotic stuff that was really tasty.
Kefir is also really good for straw drinking.

Sport bottles (like the kind you use on your bike) make great alternatives for drinking when your lips are too swollen to fit together and suck on a straw.

Here are two house-made recipes that are pretty marvelous:

Potato-Leek Soup:
4 leeks, rinsed well -- cut the dark green off the top, then cut lengthwise into quarters and chop into bits
2 shallots peeled and chopped
4 russet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
3 Tablespoons unsalted butter
1 Tablespoon unbleached all-purpose flour
4 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
1 bay leaf
1 cup (or more) milk
salt and pepper

- In a big pot over medium heat, melt the butter and sautee the leeks and shallots until tender, about 15 minutes.
- Sprinkle flour over it and cook until flour is absorbed, about 2 minutes
- Increase to high heat and gradually whisk in the broth. Add potatoes and bay leaf, cover, and bring to a boil
- Decrease heat to medium-low and simmer until the potatoes are tender and mushy.
- Let it sit and cool for a bit, then remove the bay leaf and blend it all (use a hand blender in the pot or use your kitchen blender, but be careful because it's hot and it splatters). Add salt, pepper, and milk until it's tasty, smooth, and easy to drink through a straw.


Mama's fruit shake
1/2 avocado (peeled)
handful of blueberries (washed well)
2 apricots (washed well, unpeeled)
1 mango (washed well, unpeeled)
rice milk

- Blend it all together until it's smooth. Add protein powder for more nutrition.


Fix-Me-Up Fresh Juice
15 carrots, washed well
3 beets washed and peeled
5 celeries washed well
2 apples, cored

- Get a juicer, or find a friend with one
- Chop them into pieces small enough to fit in your juicer
- Juice it together and mix it up.


Those are a few of the foods that are speeding me on the road to recovery.
Enjoy!

ouch

This has been a bit of a crazy weekend.
To start with, I gave a ride to a rather crazy woman whom I thought was friends with my mother-in-law. The flagged us down as I drove Mama home, and they knew each other from riding the bus. The lady said she needed to get to Jack London Square and her father just called to say he was visiting her. As we were driving, it became apparent that the father was flying in at midnight (and I didn't get to make the connection between that and her need to go to Jack London Square before she got out to, apparently, try to find a friend while I waited--and then disappeared. I don't know what I almost got messed up in, but it was strange.
Then yesterday morning I was biking with a group of friends, trying out a friend's road bike. I was approaching an uphill and having trouble shifting the gears when I hit some sandy gravel, panic-braked, and tossed myself over the handlebars. I landed on my face. Fortunately I was wearing a helmet and I landed in the gravel and not on the pavement or the very nearby curb. Luckily a police officer was driving by just afterward, and there were other friends around to help. My partner was able to ride in the ambulance and be with me for the grueling 5-hour ER procedures that involved lots of local anesthetic shots on my face, lengthy rinsing of the sand & gravel out of my mouth and wounds, and the 4 sets of stitches in and around my mouth. The doctors and nurses were very friendly, and I was grateful that he was rightfully included as my partner. I am so lucky to have my fiance around, to take care of me, rub my feet, make smoothies and soup and fetch me water. I'm not able to talk well yet, and I'm quite swollen and crusty. It remains to be seen if my nose is fractured, and my jaw seems a little lopsided. We'll see.
If you want to see a photo of us after the ER, let me know.
I also want to thank our friends Matt & Claire, who went out of their way to make sure the bikes and cars got sorted out, and who made a special grocery run for smoothies and foods to keep my strength and healing. Send some special energy to Matt, also, who probably saw the whole thing go down--and I know it wasn't pretty.

So that's the update.
My partner was so brave, sitting with me as I bled out of my mouth, watching the cleaning and stitching (it wasn't pretty, I'm sure), and holding my hand and rubbing my feet while I dealt with the pain.
And even with my ugly, scraped up, oozing face, he still looks at me with love...it's beautiful.

thanks to James Baldwin

I am reading Just Above My Head by James Baldwin. His novels are intense, and this is the best I've read. He writes so sharply, almost viciously, about the inner thoughts and experiences of his characters--in this case, a Black family in New York in the 1940s-60s. I don't know, I can't quite describe it, but his descriptions of his characters' inner lives is amazing. He is unsparing about the state of racial dynamics in the US, and it makes me wonder how much as really changed on the larger level. That's all, I just wanted to recommend it.

PS: Here's where I got the recommendation to read the book, from an article by Kai Wright about his father. (Kai Wright, incidentally, is the author of the book Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York which I hope to read soon.)
Equanimity Under Duress
This is good stuff, about fathers & sons, about race & sexuality, about personal stories and experiences.

body

Today I am home with a little health complication that is only serious enough to keep me from working too far away from a bathroom.

It reminds me that over the past few months I've noticed my body is just tired more often, and my mood is a little crankier. Plus I have all these little bruises, scrapes, and cuts from minor accidents where I hit my head while getting into a car or off the bus, or I scrape my finger while grating cheese or chopping onions. It reminds me that I stopped seeing my chiropractor because I couldn't afford it, and I no longer do Tai Chi with Emily, and I sort of cut out a lot of the body stuff I used to do (aside from exercise, which is helpful, but not the same thing). I wonder if anybody has suggestions about what they do to keep in touch and aware of their bodies.

read this

Safaricom, a Kenyan mobile phone service just did an initial public offering (IPO) of stocks, and the BBC's story (but more the responses from readers) seems to encapsulate the complicated nature of market economics on a global scale. It reminds us to ask the question: who really benefits? The answer isn't clear. The whole global mobile phone business is an interesting thing because of the solutions it offers for remote areas that don't have land-line infrastructures (BBC also did a recent article about tele-banking for mobile phones that undercuts a lot of the complications of in-person banking).
Safaricom: Your Views

Memorial Day, part ii

So I've been thinking about my Memorial Day post about homeless veterans. Thinking so much that last night I dreamt that a friend from high school lectured me about it. I keep thinking about my parents-in-law: They are freedom fighters, who put their lives at risk in order to promote democracy in Kenya. They were driven away from their home because of their work and their commitment to democracy. They are as much veterans as the men and women I work with.
It's tricky. Because of my work, veterans hold a special place in my heart. At the same time, I question how much I ennoble them above others. True: they put themselves at risk to protect our country (once again, I set ideology aside because I'm not convinced that military action is always so protective of our country). True: some of them were forced into situations where they made terribly difficult moral/ethical decisions in split seconds (some of these are labeled heroic and others had unfortunate consequences that veterans still deal with 50 years later). True: veterans joined the military for all sorts of reasons, some volunteered out of duty or patriotic obligation; some joined because of the draft; some joined to pay for college; and some because they wanted to get out of their homes. It is also true that these are everyday citizens, many of whom were placed in extraordinary circumstances. Veterans deserve our gratitude for the sacrifices they signed up to make. We have what we have in this country because some put their lives on the line with the idea that they were protecting us from a threat to this way of life (set aside the fact that I would like to see a lot of improvements to the way of life in this country). At the same time, we have what we have in this country because everybody who lives here put ourselves on the line to make it what it is. Some exploited people and resources, and some dedicated their lives to service and betterment. All of us dedicate ourselves to just trying to get by the best way we know how. So who deserves to be homeless?
I'll tell you: The people who fucked up the system in such a way that homelessness became inevitable. No, that's not true (my nicer side tells me). Nobody deserves to be homeless, and we have to figure out how to use our incredible wealth as a country to help our own citizens as well as the rest of the world (a lot of whom were exploited to make us rich).
You know, since I started working with veterans, I've noticed an increase in patriotism. I often ask myself if I'm somehow being chauvinistic about the country I was born in. I actually think I'd be as patriotic about wherever my home is, because I live here, and I care about my neighbors. And my neighbors include the whole planet.