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Chocolate, numbers, and air

I finally saw my orthopedist again on Thursday. A funny thing happened in the waiting room. A bunch of us injured people were sitting there, you know, waiting, me feeling queasy from the light jazz yet also thinking I got off lucky as I eyed other people's casts and canes and splints and slings and straps and foam wedges. We were all glum, bored, isolated.

A woman got up to pay her co-pay and noticed that the receptionist was selling boxes of mint meltaways for $2 as a fundraiser for something or other. She bought two boxes, opened one and started offering the minty chocolates to the rest of us gimps in the waiting room. Suddenly a party broke out. Everyone was laughing, joking, pleasantly startled into life by this lady's generosity. It was a small thing that made a big difference.

Once I got to the exam room, the doctor spent about nine seconds looking at my MRI and the radiology report and confirmed that my scaphoid is not broken, I don't need surgery, and there's no need for me to have my thumb plastered in the hitchhiker position. He offered to cut the thumb part off my existing cast, but I begged him to replace the whole thing as it had started to smell like an old shoe.

So I have a new cast, which improves my quality of life quite a bit. I can use my thumb more. I can fit my arm through a jacket sleeve for the first time in three weeks. And I might get my cast off for good as soon as next week.

Even when that happens, I may not be able to swim or ride outside for a couple more weeks. Honestly, during the 10 minutes I had the cast off on Thursday, my unfettered arm felt like an alien appendage that had sprouted where my normal arm used to be. It is still visibly swollen and bruised, and still painful, and I was too terrified to move it.

In other news, I got a race number in the mail yesterday. It's for the Kaiser Permanente SF Half-Marathon, which is in two weeks. I've run this race many times, the starting line is the perfect warm-up distance from my house, and my half-marathon PR is on this course. My running, though, is not where I was hoping it would be, since I went nine or ten days without running after I broke my wrist and then delicately eased back in. Do I want to bother running it just as a long workout, knowing I won't be able to put in a good race effort? I dunno. I did already pay for my entry. I suppose I might as well use it. I'm going to attempt a 2-hour run tomorrow so we'll see how that goes.

And yes, I went to Macworld Expo and got to touch the new Macbook Air; see above for the frenzy the machine created on the exhibit hall floor. It's super-light, it's super-thin, and very few people will find this machine practical. Read this for the most insightful interpretation I've read so far.

January 19, 2008 11:15 PM