Got moved to the rehab wing of the hospital Thursday night. My hemoglobin count isn't coming up still, but it hasn't dropped precipitously like it did earlier this week. Has been hovering around 8.1 post surgery, but dropped to 7.1 midweek necessitating a transfusion of only one unit of blood for some reason instead of enough to actually top me off. Thankfully that dropped only happened once and no internal bleed is indicated.
Took a shower on my own yesterday (supervised of course). Felt good, but brought up a lot of feelings as to how the next 6 months are going to be.
Lots of pain still. They cut my dilaudid when I left trauma, but have now upped my dosage and frequency of my oxy to try and get my pain management schedule under control.
So... here's to being alive and kind of functional.

• Dog walked
• Gave myself a bad haircut
• 2 years sober today

Group ride. Mile 48ish of a planned 55 going about 23mph. Was taking it easy as I had been off the last week for mechanical issues, so I purposely dropped towards the back of the group. Got to a small incline, the guy next to me stood up and shifted his front gears at the same time which is frowned upon. The power he put through when he stood up as he was shifting caused his chain to drop. That caused him to lose all resistance on the pedal as he was standing up which made him lurch forward quickly, lose control, and then swerve sideways into me. I saw most of this happening out of the corner of my eye and can vividly remember almost all of this.

Once he hit me I don't remember much, but as best I can gather I went full horizontal and then slammed into the road on my hip. Normally when you hit you skid and get a lot of road rash. I don't think I skidded at all which means I took a large amount of power straight into my hips. There was almost no tearing in my bib shorts or my jersey and just 3 quarter sized things of road rash on my left knee, left elbow, and left shoulder. Some minor scraping on the back left of my helmet and maybe a small crack on one part (but that's just based on pictures I've seen). And oddly, a tiny bruise on the tip of my nose. My glasses flew off me face. A search team of 5 (include a police officer) looked everywhere for them and couldn't find them, so that was weird.

I did open my eyes fairly quickly after hitting the ground. Knew something was wrong immediately, but not what. Other guys trying to be helpful tried to pick me up and drag me off the road without any consideration of what the issue was... Thankfully the incident was literally across the street from a fire station, so it took them less than a minute to get there.

So... that's about the story of what happened. I had considered it a complete accident and no hard feelings at first, but I have since found out the guy apparently had been having problems with his chain all day which has made it much harder to have no hard feelings since if he truly was having problems and knowingly kept riding and ****ed up the next 6-12 months of my life...

maroon barchetta said:

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Why is she at the shelter?

I thought she had a new home??

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TLDR: she did, but he returned her the next day bc he didn't heed my warning of being able to give her space from his 5 month old puppy.


She was adopted. The guy that adopted her has a 5 month old golden at home and, when they met, they got along well. But there was a point where Canela (the foster) became overstimulated and tried to crawl into my lap and jump on the couch to get behind me and away from him / the puppy, so I stressed the importance of him being able to separate them in times like this. He said it wouldn't be an issue. But he texted me at 11:45 PM the same night he adopted her and said that it WAS an issue, and he didn't think it was going to work out. He said Canela seemed extremely stressed (no s***?) and he just didn't think she would be happy if she had to continue living with them like that. So he brought her back to the shelter the next day bc once she's adopted, she's no longer my responsibility or under my care.

There is another family who is interested in her who I talked to - and frankly, thought was going to be a better fit for her, anyway. The guy had submitted his application before them and I'd initially dismissed him bc I thought she had a fear of men but discovered that, when introduced slowly and with treats, she'll warm up to them. Once I discovered this (accidentally), I felt like I owed him the first right of refusal in adopting her.

I communicated with the family to explain that she was going to be available again, and encouraged them to foster her for 2 nights to see how she did at their home with their pets. Dallas Animal Services, the city's shelter, allows you to foster for any length of time, and they'd previously wanted to do a short trial but I couldn't do it while she was under my care. So now that she was back at the shelter, this was a possibility for them. They went as far as going to the shelter and spending a significant amount of time there that afternoon to try and get everything sorted out. I'm so grateful for people like that; it gives me hope for her. In the end, she had an upper respiratory infection so taking her home to foster would have put their dog at risk of catching her doggy cold. And that's why she's still there.

It was a roller coaster of a day.