So I didn't want to drop this information before I could include some explanation, but, I broke my neck. During a failed forward breakfall at Aikido, I landed on my head and broke the top two vertebrae, CV1 and CV2. It was the fall you can see the smaller guy doing properly here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWwsz-17tSU
There was fortunately no nerve damage; I could easily have been paralyzed or lost my ability to breathe. I've done this fall hundreds of times and generally do it very well, and I don't know what went wrong; I was tired and learning a new variation on it, though. I will be in a Halo brace for 8-12 weeks while the bones heal, but I should be fine in the long term. A Halo brace is a tight brace around the upper chest that has rods supporting a sort of crown arrangement with pins driven into the skull, to immobilize the neck and allow the bones to heal very much like a cast.
I'm staying with family for the duration and haven't decided how to care for the dogs in the meantime; they may stay with me here or I'll find someone to foster them, possibly the placement charity that helped me find one of them in the first place. (They're in a kennel now.)
I'm doing extremely well considering the serious nature of the injury, and can walk around fine but not drive, so I'm staying with family. Sorry about disappearing like that, but between morphine, pain, and cellphone-based Internet access I really wasn't up for typing much. I'll probably come back to posting regularly after I get my own computer here and some kind of reasonably comfortable setup for using it, right now I'm quite uncomfortable.
I'm incredibly glad you're okay, for the most part. I wish you a speedy and less uncomfortable recovery.
ReplyDeleteOooooooooooh jeez. That's horrible...think happy thoughts and you'll heal faster (this is what my mom always said, and I believe it).
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you added right away that you're (basically) okay. If you'd simply said "I broke my neck!" and then gone incommunicado I would've been freaking out.
Yeah, I thought it would be better just to say I'm incommunicado for a bit without much explanation than leading off with the neck-breaking part.
ReplyDeleteI'm doing a lot better than I thought a person could do a week after such an injury. I can't get by without pain meds yet, but I can go easy on the dosage. I can walk, carry stuff, pick up things from the floor, etc. The neurosurgeon expects a virtually full recovery (possibly some small loss of neck mobility).
The dogs will be joining me here sometime soon, maybe tomorrow.