On The Mend! 5 months! (OK, now it's been 6)

I can't believe it's been 5 months! Almost to the day. It was August 11th. (OK, so I started this a while ago -now it's been 6 months and I'm GOING to finish it tonight!) Sometimes it seems like it really hasn't been that long and others it seems like it's been a life time since I've been able to do what I want and not have to think about every move. It's been a good 5 months though. and I feel like I'm almost back to being myself. Let's see, what's happened .....

My hair is growing back! A lot more than I thought, and when I find the right venue, I'm going to rock it with the old part and gel up the couple inch grow back.

My plate and screws are looking good.

And my incision is looking better than this. This was probably at about two months after surgery. Still pretty cankle-y, but that's getting better also. 

I MOVED! I really love my parents and I'm so glad I was able to stay at their place while I was recovering. There is nothing better than being at home when you're sick.  My parents had had a trip planned for a while, so they were gone when I had my surgery but luckily I've got great friends and brothers that were there to have sleep-overs with me and wake me up to make me toast so I could take my pain meds. However, I am really stoked to be living on my own. Going to look at houses on crutches was not ideal, but it got me moving around. It took about three Saturdays of looking to find the perfect house, but we did it. I do love to say I live in East Milcreek, and it's a great location and Kristina moved in and we've been wanting to live together forever and it was great when she moved in. Then a month later our other friend from the river Haley moved in. Our place is great!
 
It's a big one floor place and we all have big rooms and big closets (my room has two smaller ones which is great for me, one for clothes, one for jackets and back packs.... yes I need a whole closet for those!) and a great gear room where we can have all our skis.

When I moved in I was still on crutches and I got these very attractive callouses on my knees from scooting around on my knees pushing boxes and organizing everything. But it's so great to have this place that I actually have all my stuff and that I will be here for a while.


I'm so sick of moving everything every 6 months. And this place is so awesome! I'm really loving it! I am going to rent it over the summer and have a place to stay.


I drove across the country with my friend Steve. He was waiting to leave to be a mountaineering guide in Mexico and got hooked up with a random job to drive this amazing 15 passenger Clear communications van, (affectionately named Marge) from SLC to New Jersey.

I wasn't doing anything and I had a credit from when my passport got stolen in Canada last year and he wanted a navigator so I decided to join him.

We got to Michigan in 4 days and I flew out of Detroit because I had to get home for a Cry Baby party with my girlfriends from high school. What? You've never heard of Cry Baby!? Well, let me tell you, it was one of the most amazing movies I've ever seen probably 67 times. Kristine and I discovered it and have been in love with Johnny Depp ever since. Here is just a little taste of how amazing he is:

But before I left, one of the more exciting things was going to see the biggest reservoir in Nebraska.  
It's it amazing! Middle America isn't that awesome, I gotta be honest. So to pass the time I pulled some tricks out of the 7 grade sleep over bag of tricks and told some fortunes and it was pretty fun.

I got my nose pierced!

 I've wanted to do it for a long time now, and I finally figured I can't give blood for 6 months after having surgery anyway, so might as well do it now so I only have to wait another 6 months. Yup, that's my reasoning. I've put a smaller one in since I took this pic and I really like it.
Halloween was good. It was funny going places on my kneelie.
The week before Halloween my friends Rachael, Kim and Jos and I got dressed up as Zombie Prom Queens. A girl from that I used to work with at the hospital had a party that was kinda lame and so we went out down town and they almost wouldn't let me in with my kneelie. Trust me, if you ever want to get some attention, it is the way to go for sure. Just don't take it anywhere with stairs!

 

 Since then I don't really have tons of pictures because I haven't really done anything cool. I've been working on walking and not limping, not going on any great slot canyon trips or skiing or anything cool like that. I have been able to start skiing a little and it's been so great! I've gone up with Jos or Kate and I finally got to ski at Solitude with Chris and Trine and Jos and it was some amazing powder and my body was so tired! I swear there's nothing you can do to get in shape for skiing except skiing. I love being up there! It feels so great to be somewhat getting back to myself.






I have still been working at backcountry.com which I should actually say trading my great phone skills for gear bc let's be honest, I have a bit of a gear problem and looking at it and talking about it everyday makes me want so much of it! I'm getting a whole AT set up and I'm sooo stoked!
They have been a little slow and they've been cutting back some of our seasonal worker's shifts and for a few weeks I had a bunch of days off in a row and it was a bummer that I couldn't really take advantage and ski all day, so I decided to do a project. We are just renting this house, but most of it hasn't been remodeled for over 20 years. I do love the kitchen counters! (Although the boarder is my next project and probably some yellow walls)

 But the wallpaper in the bathroom just wasn't that same 'retro-cool' look as the kitchen so I thought I'd do a little project and strip the walls and paint it. It turned out to be like a 30 hour project! I've learned some really valuable lessons: NUMBER 1: Take the time you think you'll take to do the project and times it by no less than 3
Here's how it looked at the beginning: 

Camille came over to drop something off and ended up helping me for a bit

LESSON NUMBER 2: I learned how to disassemble a toilet, even though I had no intention of doing that or take the huge mirror off the wall and ended up doing both.

It literally took 10 hours to get the wallpaper off then to get all the glue off that you can see in this picture:

I chose this really cool green color that I loved, however, after all the prep work, I learned how to putty (not too hard after watching my dad do it a bunch) and sand and prime and tape everything, I did the first coat and it looked TERRIBLE with the pukey pink counter tops and the gray and white marbled shower. I was so bummed!
Thus: LESSON NUMBER 3: It doesn't matter how cool the color looks in the store, you MUST make the trip back home to try it with the rest of the stuff in the room. 

So, after like a week of no zit popping because the light in my room is terrible and we didn't have a mirror or lights, I finally got the bathroom put back together.

LESSON NUMBER 4: It's not that hard to take a light fixture down. I was pretty nervous to do that, but putting that back up ended up being the least eventful part of the project.

LESSON NUMBER 5: It's OK to drill like 4 holes at each spot where the mirror holders will go because the mirror will eventually cover it up, but it sure would have been a lot easier to notice where they were when I took them off then puttied them over.

So, here's the finished product. We decided that a kinda dark gray would be a lot more benign, and it looks pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. There's a few things I need to fix (the mirror is just a little bit crooked and it just may drive me crazy) but I need to take a breather from house remodeling for a bit. 

Anyway, thanks for sticking with the epic novel of a blog! Now I'm caught up so it won't be such a daunting task to update. Happy winter!

The other side of the knife

When I had my ACL surgery I was awake for just a minute when I was in the OR and I remember thinking it was so cool in there. Then when I started working in the OR I was stoked to see an ACL surgery and see how it worked. I've done mostly orthopedic surgeries and I love doing those. I like it because it's like a construction room. It's funny though how I sometimes feel like once we finish the surgery it's like, OK, they're better. As a tech I never have to see any of the recovery and I don't realize that nope, they're not fixed.
But I'm learning nore and more about it. So, that's the answer ...

Yes I had to have surgery.

 Turns out my Talus bone was broken and it was in about 5 different pieces. 

 

 I went in to see Dr. Drew VanBoerum and had an X-ray on a Mon, went in for a CT on Tues,

went back in on Wed and he'd looked at the CTs and decided that I did need surgery and his assistant came in and said how about tomorrow? I had to cancel / reschedule my end of the season river party up at my cabin but decided it's better now than in a week. So, the next morning my mom took me in and I was the first one. I knew the anesthesiologist, and Drew's PA and it was cool going in there knowing exactly what I he was going to do. I asked the nurse to take some pictures and she only took one. Lame! I wanted a whole play by play, but this is the best she got. Still looks pretty cool though. You can see the plate and the screws.

So, here I am, 10 days after surgery, getting really antsy. For the first few days I was pretty drugged up on Oxycodone so I didn't mind just hanging in bed and drifting in and out of sleeping, but that didn't do that great for my "system". So,  I've been cutting back and my leg feels better if it's elevated but I am just starting to get out. I've been getting out and about a little more now and my armpits are killing from the crutches and I can't be up for too long, but it's feeling much better. I have to be no weight bearing for 6 more weeks! But it'll be better in the long run and it'll work almost as good as new. I'm hoping anyway, but it'll be better than it would have been if I'd just gone on my trip, so I'm really glad Angela was persistent and got me to go see Drew. Anyway, if anyone wants to come watch a movie or go to one, I'm in! 

...I hate waiting!

Update on my physical status:

Doing much better than the last post. My head is healing nicely, still some scabs hanging on ( I have no idea how after 7 weeks they're still there, especially with my lack of will power not to pick them but they're still there). The scar is looking pretty good and I've gotten used to the comb-over from the left, and had my hair cut so it looks like it's supposed to go that way. My butt looks much better and my muscles were still giving me some problems but they're also doing much better. My ankle, well that's a different story that will come later.

Update on my mental status:


Kinda getting a little stir crazy not really being able to do anything. I did miss one river trip, but did get to go on my last one. My brother, Eric came and I really couldn't have done it without him.

He was really great at not letting me carry heavy, awkward things and I was really glad he came to be my muscles and also just that he got to explore the Canyon.

 

It was a really pretty trip and great weather. I didn't get to do a lot of the hikes but Eric would go on big long runs on some nights. I was really glad that he came. We had to spend an extra day in the Canyon and wait for a trip a day behind us to derig and Eric spent like 6 hours working on this cool sculpture thing, it was cool.

So, since then I've just been working on trying hard not to push it too much and I've been planning a big trip this fall. I've been planning this for a while and the last couple weeks and I've found and bought all my airfare for a great trip! 

I'm going to DC for a couple days, then to LONDON and I'll spend a few days with some people that have come on river trips. Then I'll have two weeks to go around Europe. I've got another hook up from the river in PARIS and I'm not quite sure where else I'll go on my way to AMSTERDAM to fly to KENYA. My aunt and uncle have a program called Kenya Keys that they started and I'll be spending three weeks there with my uncle and two other girls in the bush. Then I'll go to THAILAND for a month and be home by Christmas. I'm getting so psyched and I've got appointments for immunizations and I'm getting my packing list ready. Then ...

Last week I actually figured I could go biking. I rode down to the Farmer's Market last week and I've ridden up Emigration Canyon several times and it feels really good to be moving my body! I rode out to the mouth of the canyon the other day and I finally felt like I was starting to feel like myself again. My body felt fine while I was riding but clipping out of my pedals was a different story. I'd have to use my hand or just take my shoe off then take it off. That's fine, right? My friend, Angela that is finishing her residency in ER med, came biking with me and she kept encouraging me to get it looked at again and told me what could happen if it was broken and I didn't get it fixed, so I caved and made an appointment and guess what .... I've got a freakin broken ankle!  

My talus bone is fractured and I had a CT today and tomorrow he's going to read it and determine the next few months of my life. Either I've got to have surgery and that will make me stay home for sure or I'll have to wear a boot for who know how long and I'll maybe go depending on how easy it is to walk in ... who knows! Tomorrow, tomorrow, that'll determine the rest of my life!! Well, OK, that may be a little dramatic, but that's what it feels like. I'll let you know.

June Lake turns to misadventure ...

Where do I start .... My family has been having a great trip in June Lake, CA. Coulson couldn't make it and Jess's on his mission, so it's been Eric and Thayne and my parents and me and we've been having a great time! This place is amazing and we've done a bunch of fun stuff. We went biking at the Mammoth ski resort and it was really fun trying to keep up with my younger brothers.



The thing I've been wanting us all to do is go to Yosemite. I love that place and my brothers climb a little and I wanted to do a route with them. So I found this route I've done before called Munginella. This is a little hard to explain in non-climber terms, but when I did it before, I did it in 3 pitches, (a pitch is basically is a rope length). Normally when you do a multi-pitch route the leader climbs first, gets to the anchors or a good ledge or something to stop on. Then the second climber climbs up to the leader and they keep going up from there. So, with multi-pitch routes, each pitch could be about the full length of your rope since you're never come back down. But with a single pitch route, the leader gets to the top, hooks in to the anchors, then comes back down, thus doubling over the rope, so that a single-pitch route needs to be shorter so that the leader can get back to the ground. Eric and Thayne have climbed a little, but not a ton and they weren't feeling up for a multi-pitch route so I thought we'd just do the first pitch of Munginella, then call it at that. Since I had climbed it before I didn't even think about my rope not being long enough. Another blunder I had made was when I was packing to come, I'd put all my climbing stuff together, but I'd put my climbing helmet with my bike helmet and realized about an hour away from Yosemite that I'd left it at the condo. But admittedly I'm not super good about wearing a helmet when I climb and the route was only a 5.6 which is a route I can climb without my trouble.


So, we bush-wacked a little to get to the base of the wall, then we had to scramble up like 50 feet to get to the base of the route. My mom and dad came up because they wanted to watch us and I was way impressed that they made it up there. (That's Mama Shell in the picture)


So I was the first to go and I lead the route and it was some fun climbing.


I set the anchors and had Thayne start belaying me down. He's climbed a little but enough that I trust him and we'd gone over how to belay and how to let me back down but I didn't even think to tell him to watch for the rope, and I have never been good at tying knots in the end of my rope. No one I climb with really does and it just never even crossed my mind. Thayne was talking to everyone and was distracted and Eric noticed just a second too late that the rope was too short and it went through the belay device, which means that I was free-falling about 30 feet from the ground. It's funny because my first thought when there was no tension on the rope was "funny Thayne..." I thought he was letting just a little bit go to kinda scare me, but then it just never caught and I realized I was falling. I think I hit my heals on a little lip on the face and it flipped me upside down and I hit my whole lower back / butt area pretty bad and I don't know what else, but my brothers knew that if they didn't stop me at the belay ledge I would have kept going another 60 feet to the ground. Luckily they kinda tackled me and stopped me but I hit my head on a pretty sharp rock when I landed and instantly started bleeding. My dad ran down to get help and we put pressure on it while I tried to get my barrings.


So, to my embarrassment, the Search and Rescue Team came up. I kept trying to feel OK about getting down myself. I never blacked out so I thought I was pretty well off, but both my ankles were swelling up and my pelvis hurt pretty bad so I swallowed my pride and decided to do what Matt Stark -the main SAR guy in charge- suggested and get all bundled up and short lined out of there.


It was a pretty cool process. I have always loved knots and safety systems and doing swiftwater rescue and stuff like that. I didn't have the best view of what all was actually going on, it was pretty cool to see it all work and they were such a well-oiled team. It was funny because I knew one of the girls from Snowbird. She's on the patrol up there and I've climbed with her at the gym, it seems I always know someone where ever I go and although I was a little embarrassed to see her in my situation, it was cool to see a face I knew.


There were also a bunch of other rugged, manly faces I wanted to get to know, but didn't think that was the ideal situation to be picking up dudes with blood all over my face and hair.



They rigged me up and lowered me off the edge down the scrambly part that was pretty steep. This guy in the video (it will come later, the internet here is pretty lame), after he got situated, pulled me away from the cliff while they lowered us down.


At the bottom there were like 3 more people waiting with this sweet cart thing with one wheel on it, that made for a pretty nice ride down the mountain.


We were met by an ambulance that took me to a field where a helicopter was waiting .... that's right a helicopter. I tried to fight that but they wanted to do a CT scan and Matt assured me that I wanted someone with a little more experience with plastics to close up my head than they had at the clinic there. So they loaded me into the helicopter for a 45 min ride to Modesto.


I was pretty bummed I didn't get to at least see how cool it was to fly over Half Dome and through the Valley. How sweet would that have been! The flight nurse tried to sit me up a little to no avail, but she did send me pictures of the flight in. She was nice. She gave me morphine, like I said, she was nice. My hips were getting pretty sore from lying flat on them the whole time.

So, in Modesto, they did X-rays of my head, neck pelvis and both ankles and no broken bones! It's pretty much a miracle! Including my skull! Which you can see in some of the pictures! My mom doesn't think I should put some of these pictures on here, but maybe it's my missing the OR that makes me think these are cool, and having someone take a picture and show me was the only way I could see it, so I'll put some of the more graphic ones at the end and you can choose to not look if you don't want to, but I think they're pretty cool. I had a PA for a plastics guy sew up my head and it took forever but she did a great job. She did a layer of stitches under a layer of staples and so I am now the proud holder of the most staples / stitches of all my brothers! With four younger, wild, active brothers, that's saying a lot! Eric and Jess already have scars just back in their hair lines but mine beats them hands down. Mine is pretty much along my whole part. Luckily they didn't have to shave my head or anything, but a lot of hair was cut by the rock and my mom said a bunch fell off in her hands when she first put pressure on it. So, that's sad, I'm going to have to part my hair on the other side. That'll ruin my whole look!

If you're ready for it, here's the finished look.

All (well, not all) the goop around it is KY. They say that breaks down the proteins so it's easier to wash out the clots and stuff. I'm so lucky to be on this trip with my family. I'm getting such great service! My mom gave me a bath today and washed my hair and my brothers are carrying me everywhere and making me food (when I don't feel like I'm going to barf) and rubbing my back. I'm thinking I may have to try this more often! Absolutely just kidding. I realized in the helicopter that this happened almost exactly 10 years after I broke my back on a family trip. (If you don't know that story check it out) So, in 10 years in August I will lock myself in my house and not go anywhere with my family!

That being said, I'm not going to stop living my life. Much to my dad's chagrin (who almost sold all my gear for like $20 to this other couple that climbed up and got it all after we left) I'm not going to stop climbing. I will be adamant about wearing a helmet, even on a 5.6 I've done before, and I will always tie a knot in the end of my rope. Had this happened biking or hiking or something, I don't think it would change people's attitude of that, but I think that since people already think climbing is dangerous this gives it such a bad reputation. But I've always said, and I still believe that climbing is safe. It's a great sport that requires a lot of mental dedication and trust in your gear, yourself and your belayer. I don't know of any other sport that is as mental as climbing and I love that about it. There were a lot of dumb factors that went into this accident and I don't blame Thayne! I'm the one that knows what's going on and I should have told him to look for the half way mark on the rope and I should have tied a knot and worn a helmet. I feel so bad for him because I know he's going to be scarred for life and if it had been worse, he'd never get over it. But he's taken such great care of me and I am really bummed to be giving climbing a bad image.

So, I've got 10 days to be OK to go on a river trip, and I'm thinking I can pull it off. Lots of beauty rest in this great mountain air and I'll be fine in no time! Sorry if this freaked anyone out! I'm doing fine and my family is doing great and we're ready to enjoy the rest of the vacation here! (Or, I'll learn about it from stories and pictures, but that's almost good enough)

Point is, climbing is safe and I still love it. I don't mean to be adding a high adventure risk to my life, but I just love it ... still.

Here's some of the gruesome photos. Don't look if you can turn your eyes away....


It's looked a little better...


The funny thing about this is that the scratches on the front are from my cousin's rowdy dog that I took for a walk a couple days before the trip and he attacked some cat and through chasing him and hitting him he clawed me a little.



This is the first picture they took that actually convinced me that I probably shouldn't walk down and I'd let them bring the whole SAR team.

The helicopter pilot took these when he dropped me off and sent them to me.


Notice the bald spot in the front and how thick the skin is, and how not broken my skull is!