A nice unrelaxing bike ride

Trying to be good Californians, J and I biked to the library today. Not our local branch, which didn't have the DVD we were looking for, but the one two towns over. The quickest shot was along El Camino Real, the shopper's paradise main street down the Peninsula. About half of the span we were covering had a bike lane. The other half was the cycling equivalent of Castle Wolfenstein - maneuvering around fire hydrants, road construction and piles of biodegradable waste, while trying to evade pedestrians who seemed to jump out at you whenever you turned a corner.

We got to our target safely, but during our escape, while I lead, I met my Waterloo. After biking in the road for a while to avoid a woman with a baby carriage I moved to jump back to the sidewalk. Only there was a tiny ledge at the end of the driveway. And the driveway was at the end of a car wash and slick with soapy water. And I didn't take the curb at a hard enough angle.

I didn't have that far to drop, and I wasn't biking that fast, but at a certain point while airborne I had the wit NOT to put my hands out to break my fall. The major force went into scraping my knee through my pants and painting a four inch swath of roadwrash on my forearm. And I was grateful.

Rather calmly, I think, I walked to the nearest bathroom (inside the carwash, which was incidentally the strangest car wash I've ever been in, complete with a convenience store and gift shop selling stuffed animals). I washed myself off. We went to Target to get hydrogen peroxide.

Hand injuries suck in general, but can be lethal to a surgeon's training. Some residents have had to repeat entire years of training because of skiing accidents, and even minor scrapes can keep you out of the OR. We'll see what happens to me tomorrow, whether my injury is high enough that they'll allow me come in having washed the lower part of my arm. Otherwise I might have to take a scratchy sponge and rub iodine into my abrasion.

Ouch!

I must say that my year in general surgery has made me more blase about scrapes and bruises. I'll live. My hand is okay. And the pain reminds me of how my patients must hurt whenever I change their dressings. Surgery is, after all, merely legalized torture. We call one of our traditional dressing treatments the "wet to dry dressing". This consists of dampening a piece of gauze, lying it in the wound, and letting it dry. Eight hours later, the plan is to come back and pull out the dry dressing, and with it, the thin layer of dead cells and fibrinous layer on the top of the wound (basically, a primitive scab). Doing so "debrides" the wound. Doing so hurts like hell the first few times, and merely like the dickens the fourth or fifth time. Eventually the wound scars over and they don't feel a thing.

Don't get me started on the Wound Vac. I'll write about that later.