Passes & Canyons Blog » Blog Archive » Looking Good, Doing Better, Don’t Be In A Hurry
This is not really sharp because it is a photo of a laptop screen. The image is flopped, or shot from below, not above, but on the left (right in real life) near the top you can see an area where my brain is pushed away from the skull a bit. This is a huge, huge improvement over the scan just before surgery.
I was in to see the results of my latest CT scan on Tuesday and it looked vastly better. And I’m feeling good, so now I can drive again and ride a motorcycle and drink wine and go to the gym, right?
Not so fast. It seems like they could have told me this earlier but apparently it is standard practice for brain surgery patients to refrain from driving and most of these other things for a full 12 weeks after surgery. 12 weeks! Huang, who removed the staples from my head, said she knows when you’re living it 12 weeks seems like a long time. But just think, she said, about not following protocol and having bad things result that you’ll live with for a whole lot longer.
OK. But that throws a whole of things I had in mind out the window.
For starters, all these many years I have always made it my practice to ride all my bikes at least once every calendar month. The only time I have not done so was for two months following my heart surgery. Now it looks as though brain surgery will do the same, causing me to miss two entire months of riding. It’s also going to make it a lot harder to keep coming up with topics for this blog because mostly what I write about is riding.
I had a lot of specific plans. Next week the RMMRC is doing a day ride up to the newly re-opened Bucksnort Saloon. I had been counting on that being my first post-surgery ride. Nope.
Then the following week I had every intention of going to Cheyenne for a Yamaha demo days event up there so I could test ride a Tracer 9. If I liked it as much as I expect I would then have come home and done a little shopping and gone to buy one. Now I’m wondering if I’ll just end up waiting for next year’s demo events and do all this at that time.
Also, Nick from Chicago wants to come out and ride the Million Dollar Highway. I was going to plan that ride for the two of us and then post it on the RMMRC site for anyone else in the group to join us. That would have happened in September. What I figure I’ll do is go ahead and map out the ride and then post that on the site, with the understanding that I will not be along to be the leader, which whoever posts the ride generally is. Someone else will need to lead. And I’ll hook Nick up with them so he’ll have that group to go with.
Plus, I was planning on just doing a bunch of riding on my own to make up for lost time. Judy said it was like when she broke her arm when she was a teenager. She missed the entire summer season at the local swimming pool. Why couldn’t she have broken her arm in November instead of June!
So now, in six weeks I’ll go back for my ninth–and this time maybe really final–CT scan, and then I’ll see the doctor in four more weeks. Then I can resume a normal life? I sure hope so.
There is one small step forward. Huang said it would be OK for me to drink maybe half a glass of wine at dinner now. Not a whole glass, just half. Consider it done.
Biker Quote for Today
My helmet has many stories to tell of me banging it walking out of doorways.
Tags: brain surgery, drunk driver crash
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