Recovery

Now, given the difficulties of keeping up with the vast proportion of the world's population who read this blog, I'd just like first to thank both of you for your kind enquiries during my recent bout of legbrokenness, and offer here a small update. The dashing young chirurgeon told me how long it would be till I'd be fine, and since 'tis zackly that time to the very day I thought I'd take him at his word and complete the ride I set off for on 3rd April.

I can therefore say that the quickest I have ridden Marahau Hill, door-to-door and via Kaiteri, is one hour and twelve minutes, and the slowest is four months. - Yes you're quite right, it is spelt Kaiteriteri but I don't know anyone who pronounces it that way other than hitch-hikers, and as often as not they struggle with it too but not half as much as they struggle with Marahau.

For the record then, it was trikes at first, then the Rain Bike at two months, and from a fortnight ago, a racing bike. And my daily walks to the sea and back - 2.4 miles total - improved from an hour and a half to the current forty minutes, gradually shedding crutches as we went.

Three days ago Sam popped in, armed with a bent trike kingpin for me to repair, and yesterday a retired soldier dropped in to see if a recumbent trike would better answer his cycling needs than his upright trike. These experiences have set me a-thinking, mostly reinforcing a long-cherished idea of spelling out what the best human-powered vehicle in the Whole Whorld might be. And I have to conclude that the Rain Bike is probably It.

The Rain Bike. 

The Rain Bike is a heavy Dutch lady's bicycle made of common steel (the bicycle, not the Dutch lady), having drum brakes, a fully enclosed chain, three hub gears, a side-stand, a dynamo and lights, and very good 700c tyres with rather thin sidewalls. The step-through frame is ideal for an imperfect leg, and really rather good for mounting when the back is laden with panniers. If three gears are inadequate you get off and push. A chaincase makes for liberal oiling and not having to worry unduly about road dust or - obv. -rain. A side-stand allows for propping up at the wayside to gather litter and a dynamo saves having to think about batteries on those rare occasions when night travel is called for. Good tyres make the biggest difference to any bicycle: rolling resistance is more important than we generally credit. Being Dutch in origin, it even has an integral lock, and since nobody else shares my values this is adequate unto the day.

The only thing the Rain Bike lacks is a decent saddle. Unf. decent saddles, esp. on an upright where so much of your weight goes through it, are hard to find since they must tailor themselves to the individual's behind.

Therefore I do solemnly declare that you don't need to spend a great deal of money to own a serviceable bicycle.

I make no such declaration, however, concerning the high school's microscopes, which have once more turned up for maintenance. It's a funny thing that the old, expensive instruments never need anything doing to them. Anything new, glimmery and grey can be guaranteed to be a piece of shit.

Cripple Trikes

Good evening World; here is a Progress Report. I am heaps better; daily there are improvements.

The penny trike only managed to get used going round the garden: I still haven't thought up a seat for it.

Last week I attached Pixie Pedals to the white upright trike, the small pedalling circle being all that my right hip was prepared to tolerate. Nicked from a child's bicycle (sorry, child) the chainring would only accommodate a wide chain, and the white trike having a narrow one I took the angle grinder to it and five minutes later it was better behaved. Having but 28 teeth and four-inch cranks, I pedalled at the equivalent of a
170mm ÷ 4" x 28 teeth = 46.85 teeth chainring,
which was rather higher geared than I'd imagined till I came to that hill going up to the Mot Bridge. My standard 18.55 mile daily ride took two and a half hours, and on one occasion the front tyre blew out and I had to push it two miles home having omitted to bring a repair kit, thereby discovering that a trike makes quite a decent walking frame. An interesting observation was that, when pedalling a tricycle with a crutch bungeed to the crossbar, you no longer exist. Overtaking cyclists pass you without a word. Oncoming cyclists ignore your cheery wave. It's not as if I even take sugar.

Pixie pedals, on four-inch cranks

After a few days of this I clambered into the yellow trike, and was pleased to find I could pedal a rotation of its six-inch cranks, and rode off to the supermarché. There a large elderly lady accosted me -
"Where have you come from on that?"
I told her.
"Where are you going?"
I told her.
"Oh. That's a very long way. You shouldn't be going so far. You need to be careful - at least you're not weight-bearing. I've nursed a lot of patients with a broken hip."
I thanked her politely, wondering if she always offered random people in carparks free nursing advice, and what she'd do if you were to ask, say, for a gratuitous haemorrhoid massage while she was about it. Then a skinny boy of about twenty saw the trike and said "Awesome, bro!" so that cheered me up.

The yellow trike. It's a bit grubbier now. That photo must be from at least fifteen years ago.

My daily ride is now an hour and three quarters - not quite the hour it normally takes but who cares - what else would I be doing? Well yesterday it was mowing a lawn and today I mowed another, and though I was a bit lurchy and it took three times as long, I felt very proud.

And just for fun I put the original 170mm cranks back on the white trike and found I can now ride it, no bother. All we have to do is wait till I can balance and get onto two wheels.

Just as a matter of interest, I asked the consultant at Outpatients how much the steel implant cost, and found it was $1,800 and that each screw was another $100. But then thirty years ago, a broken neck-of-femur meant lying in a hospital bed for six months under traction at $700 a night. All in all, a bargain.

Broken femur

Pride comes before a fall.

Tubes and a machine and everything

On Sunday last I set off on my natty little Peugeot to do Marahau Hill and, with a gentleman on a perfectly good mountain bicycle behind me, found myself pedalling with increasing vigour and exuberance in the pre-lunchtime sunshine. At the LH corner of the road this translated into disaster. My pedal hit the road, I flew briefly into the air, and as Mr. Larrington would put it, I landed on New Zealand.

I lay for a shocked moment and a father playing with his youngsters on the swings from across the road called to see if he could help.
"No, I'm alright. I'll get up in a moment."
This proved to be incorrect. I tried to move and immediately didn't.

Two more gentlemen on perfectly good mountain bicycles came the opposite way, stopped, and attempted to help me to my feet. I have not known such instant pain, and my screams were loud enough to alert Dr. Brewer in the house opposite, who came hopping out in his moon boot fresh from his own recent ankle-crushed disaster. The father had meanwhile wisely ignored my overconfidence and had alerted Danny, the ambulance driver who lives down the road and with whom I exchange daily waves, and Danny assessed the situation and called an ambulance. A policeman appeared out of the ether and stood in the sun to keep me in shade. Someone recovered the shards of my helmet and the scattered (prescription, so valuable) lenses of my sunglasses. It was all very civilised and friendly.

Annie and Liz appeared with the ambulance and applied gas-and-air while they scooped me up onto their person-scooper, and with the movement once again my screams of pain alerted the entire nation that I'd had a mishap. Liz was sweet and kept me calm and said she was sure I'd be okay, but though they didn't tell me, they all knew I'd broken something.

You have little geographical sense on your back in an ambulance but in forty minutes I was in Nelson Hospital and within another ten had had an x-ray and a fairly large amount of morphine, blurring the period when Monique or Annie or Clare or Millie or Steph or Jill or Mary or Helen or Hannah or - crumbs, the number of nurses who care for you in a short period of time is phenomenal. Dead nice they were, too. Kept taking obs and feeding me painkillers and even had a machine that goes bing!. Daniel admitted me and Perry was my consultant and Heath operated and Katy and Kerry or it might have been Karen were my anaesthetists and they oozed intelligent confidence and experience and I knew I was going to be alright even though anaesthetics is the business of nearly killing you.

The interesting experience was the ketamine when they knew they'd have to roll me onto my crippled side to do an epidural. My world turned antiaesthetic and the inside of my brain became a weird fluorescent blue and my existence shrank into a series of small blue cubes as I sank to the bottom of a swimming pool full of air and I became nothing more than two tiny dots of light inside my mind, and I thought "This is death, and it seems odd that I'm not even slightly afraid", and I knew for a fact I was dead even though I went in and out of being able to hear the constant murmur of cheerful voices and even laughter of a confident team of nine people calmly going about the business of pulling a person apart and screwing large pieces of R9 steel into his skeleton to fix it. And all of a sudden there was Katy the consultant anaesthetist calmly saying into my now wide-awake ear "It's all finished, Richard, and it went perfectly." And Erika - yet another of the myriad of nurses who made me feel cherished - chatted me cheerfully through Recovery, and eventually I was wheeled up to Ward 9 station B which was to be my home for the next five days.

There I met Mungo, whom we shall discuss shortly. I'm too achy at present to do him justice.