Page of Pain
My (and other folks I personally know) recent malaises, wounds and pains. In order to share the true visceral experience, these photos are rather large.
Click on a photo for more flickr verbiage on what happened.
Why does this guy (David LaPuma) look like he has a beanie on his head? Well of course if he is on the page of pain you know why. Click on the image to follow his story on Flickr.
This is a picture of a boat cleat, used for mooring boats. This is not my boat (actually its only 1/2 mine), but on the back end of either side of the boat there is a similar cleat. I was out on the boat dragging Kiah and the young women from our church around on Lake Sammamish. This involves a lot of circlilng so that you end up taking the boat (and the folks on the tube) across its own wake. We had just pulled up as someone had fallen off. While we were waiting for one girl to get back in the boat I decided to jump in the water to cool off. Rather than dive off the back of the boat, I stood up on the side right next to the cleat. Due to the circling you end up creating a lot of waves. As I went to dive off the side, the boat bobbed in the water and as I dove off, the cleat ripped into my foot and cut me. I climbed back in the boat, and drove back to Vasa park. I wrapped a twisted towel around my foot and hobbled back to the shore where I backed the trailer into the water. Since Stac is really not skilled on driving the boat, I had to hobble out to the water and pull the boat onto the trailer. After driving back to Mike's house to drop the boat off, I drove myself to the new Swedish ER center at Lake Sammamish. The nurse gave me a tetanus shot since I couldn't remember the last time I had one. Then he said "Now I am really going to hurt you" and proceeded to shoot anesthetic directly into the cut, which hurt like the devil. The doc later came in and sewed me up and sent me home.
Click for a bigger picture
This is Joan's second appearance on the page of pain, her first was with the dog and her finger. She got a cyst under her eye. To have it removed she wrote:
The doctor stuck 3 large needles right in the very painful, infected growth, to supposedly numb it, then they turned my eyelid inside out and put a clamp on the growth, then while I am watching (because i can't close my eye and i am awake!).. Iwatch as sharp instruments come in my eye and slice the cyst open,dig and cut and disect and probe, more needles and numbing, more digging, you get the picture (I just kept imagining myself delivering my most painful baby... (brian) and telling myself this was nothing compared to that! And it sort of worked.
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Nose Incident from my brother-in-law. In his words:
WARNING! WARNING! These are very gruesome!
Some good friends of ours the Rudd's finally gave into their daughter's wishes and got a dog, Chloe a black lab mix. They adopted it from the local humane society. It was a great dog, good natured and friendly. However some of our other friends, the Hickmans, have a little dog (Fox Terrier?) named Cosmo that is a bit yappy, and like most small dogs thinks its a bit bigger than it is. Big dogs and little dogs can sometimes get into altercations. One day while Joan Rudd was visiting the Hickman's, Chmloe and Cosmo got into a very bad fight. Chloe had Cosmo by the throat and was shaking him, Joan had tried repeatedly to Chloe off of Cosmo to no avail, so she reached in and grabbed him by the head to get him off, and in the scuffle he bit the top of her index finger off. Here are the photo's of in its healing stage.
A friend from work, Frazier Miller, had an accident kite boarding. Further details of the entire tale will be forthcoming when I can drag it out of him. In the meantime the 50 cent boiled down version is, that while his kite and he caught some air off of a wave, his surfboard which was still attached to him via a bungee tether, submerged under a wave. When the board exited the wave it sprang up and smashed into his leg, tearing it open and breaking his knee with a compound fracture. Amazingly enough Frazier didn't even realize that he had broken his knee. He actually kited into shore and upon reaching the beach and attempting to walk his knee crumpled under him. Looking down at his leg, he saw the gash in his wet-suit, his bone sticking out and the blood, luckily the leg's major arteries are along the backside and were not affected. Regardless he passed out, a nurse on the shore assisted him applying a tourniquet, someone called an ambulance and within 30 minutes he was in the ER and into surgery.
My sister Robyn and her family were camping at Lake Powell in their trailer. Their second child Ryan was sleeping on the bed that is suspended near the ceiling. Somehow in the middle of the night he plunged head first over the edge and landed on his head. The rest of the family was sleeping on the foldout beads below and there is only about a 12 inch space between them, but somehow he landed between them. This ripped his head open to the bone, they had to drive him about 30 minutes to Page Arizona where he got 30 stitches, 18 outside and the rest internal. In this picture he almost looks proud. ;)
Dan Hogan one of my scouts broke his arm, both bones, falling off a rope swing in Paso Nogal Park, two hours before we were to go rock climbing.
At this point Dan is on morphine.
Here is the contraption they used to straighten out his arm. Fingers to into the wire mesh.
That my friends is a tick in my leg. I probably got it hiking/biking in Briones. I went to the Doc to get it out, in case of Lyme disease, and to have him remove it. He seemed pretty excited, "Wow I have never seen one of these alive, just dead ones and pictures."
August 28th 2002, my daughter's birthday I fell while carrying a neighbor boy back to his house and skinned up both my knees.
While hiking in Marin I ran into Poison Oak. Here is the story. 75 to 85 percent of the population is allergic to poison oak, as a youngster I frequently came in contact with the substance and had no ill effect. So while friends warned me to beware of poison oak, I just laughed and trundled off naively thinking nothing of it. The hike followed a creek bed, at this time of year dry, and the path could be generously called a deer trail. I was carrying Sofi on my back and had to wend my way carefully through the woods. We arrived at a waterfall and not seeing the trail I decided to go up. After clawing my way to the top I was still a bit from the ridge, and so I set off up the hill through the brush. There was no longer any semblance of a trail and soon we could go no further and eventually turned around and found our way down. Needless to say much of what we were crashing through was poison oak. The reaction is caused by a chemical known as urushiol. If you are allergic symptoms appear 24 to 36 hours later. So it wasn't until a couple of days later that my eye and arms began to itch and swell. Here they are at day 4:
And at day 5
On day 6 I visited a doctor and she prescribed a steroid Prednisone, which in just a day had started to have a dramatic clearing effect. Here are pictures on day 7:
Future plans for fighting Poison Oak center on Technu and Stokogaurd. Some useful links are the Poison Oak Faq and the hilarious Ode to Poison Oak
I got some tumor zit growth on my nose, which made a red painful bulbous protrusion. You can see how swollen the right side of my nose how is.
