by BOX » Wed Dec 04, 2019 1:55 pm
Thanks, Major. I’m glad to finally be (mostly) healed up. I’m an active guy, so not being able to move was really starting to get to me.
We bought a house in January and we’ve slowly been working on it since. A previous owner decided to turn what would be our front yard into a parking area and dumped a bunch of gravel on it. The upkeep was pretty poor so by the time we moved in it was nothing but an uneven plot of rocks and unruly weeds. Couldn’t even really mow it. So we decided to change that by ripping out all of the weeds, planting some privacy foliage, laying down some paths, and eventually building some planter boxes. Pretty boring, stereotypical married, middle-age stuff.
But we’re broke from dumping every spare penny into the house and its subsequent needs so we’re doing this ourselves – by hand, no machinery. It’s been some pretty hard work. Anyway, things were going relatively well until one night we were finishing up and I went to roll a big yard debris bin filled full of the weedy, rocky sod we’d been pulling up and it immediately rolled back and completely crushed my left leg just below the knee. I don’t know how heavy it was, but it took 3 people to lift it off me. There have been few times in my life that I felt so much pain. My entire leg from about 4 inches below the knee turned purple. It looked like I had bled gallons of blood internally with nowhere to go except to pool up around my ankle, which swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. Nothing broken that I know of, but it definitely made it difficult to walk or do much of anything on that leg for weeks. I still have some scars and a nice, hard hematoma lump still at the main point of impact. But I can walk normally now, so that’s cool.
Although my mobility was limited, I figured I could still use my upper body so I continued to throw a pick axe over my head repeatedly for days on end striking rocks and ripping up gigantic weeds until I gave myself a nice intercostal muscle strain. Those are basically the muscles that hold in your rib cage. I don’t know if any of you all have ever managed this one, but I don’t really recommend it. The entire left side of my upper body front and back ached non-stop. It literally hurt to do anything, including to breathe. Every slight jostle would have me wincing. I couldn’t push, pull, twist, raise my arm, or do just about anything but sit still without putting myself in eye-watering pain. Seriously, I think I would have rather hurt my other leg.
So, it took about a month to heal up the leg and even longer to heal up the upper body. But I’m mostly back to form now, though a bit out of shape from the combination of not exercising and filling my face full of Halloween candy and pumpkin pie for the past few weeks.
But, yeah, picked a great day for my triumphant return. It was pretty nice at the nearby jetty break with very few heads out. Definitely not a bad day on the water.