Passes & Canyons Blog

This is not really sharp because it is a photo of a laptop screen. The image is flopped, or shot from below, not above, but on the left (right in real life) near the top you can see an area where my brain is pushed away from the skull a bit. This is a huge, huge improvement over the scan just before surgery.

I was in to see the results of my latest CT scan on Tuesday and it looked vastly better. And I’m feeling good, so now I can drive again and ride a motorcycle and drink wine and go to the gym, right?

Not so fast. It seems like they could have told me this earlier but apparently it is standard practice for brain surgery patients to refrain from driving and most of these other things for a full 12 weeks after surgery. 12 weeks! Huong, who removed the staples from my head, said she knows when you’re living it 12 weeks seems like a long time. But just think, she said, about not following protocol and having bad things result that you’ll live with for a whole lot longer.

OK. But that throws a whole of things I had in mind out the window.

For starters, all these many years I have always made it my practice to ride all my bikes at least once every calendar month. The only time I have not done so was for two months following my heart surgery. Now it looks as though brain surgery will do the same, causing me to miss two entire months of riding. It’s also going to make it a lot harder to keep coming up with topics for this blog because mostly what I write about is riding.

I had a lot of specific plans. Next week the RMMRC is doing a day ride up to the newly re-opened Bucksnort Saloon. I had been counting on that being my first post-surgery ride. Nope.

Then the following week I had every intention of going to Cheyenne for a Yamaha demo days event up there so I could test ride a Tracer 9. If I liked it as much as I expect I would then have come home and done a little shopping and gone to buy one. Now I’m wondering if I’ll just end up waiting for next year’s demo events and do all this at that time.

Also, Nick from Chicago wants to come out and ride the Million Dollar Highway. I was going to plan that ride for the two of us and then post it on the RMMRC site for anyone else in the group to join us. That would have happened in September. What I figure I’ll do is go ahead and map out the ride and then post that on the site, with the understanding that I will not be along to be the leader, which whoever posts the ride generally is. Someone else will need to lead. And I’ll hook Nick up with them so he’ll have that group to go with.

Plus, I was planning on just doing a bunch of riding on my own to make up for lost time. Judy said it was like when she broke her arm when she was a teenager. She missed the entire summer season at the local swimming pool. Why couldn’t she have broken her arm in November instead of June!

So now, in six weeks I’ll go back for my ninth–and this time maybe really final–CT scan, and then I’ll see the doctor in four more weeks. Then I can resume a normal life? I sure hope so.

There is one small step forward. Huang said it would be OK for me to drink maybe half a glass of wine at dinner now. Not a whole glass, just half. Consider it done.

Biker Quote for Today

My helmet has many stories to tell of me banging it walking out of doorways.

Bill remarked that my doctor ruined my hairdo. John made the obvious comparison to a football.

So I went in to Swedish and they drilled a couple holes in my head to drain the excess fluid that was building up inside my skull and pushing my brain off to the side, where it was not intended to be. Now I’m at home, taking drugs that drain all my energy and leave me laid out on the couch most of each day.

But my latest CT scan looks much better and if the next one, in about 10 days, continues to look better I should be back on the path to normalcy soon. Meanwhile I’m not supposed to drive for three weeks or consume alcohol or exert myself more than just a little. This puts a big load on Judy but as she said, if it had been her I would do it. This is what being married is all about sometimes. I just can’t imagine someone in this condition having no one to care for them.

I had wondered about the surgery. Would they cut two little V-shaped patches and pull the skin back to drill? Apparently not. It makes sense. They seem to have made one long slit and pulled the skin back enough at each end to drill. Then when it was time to seal me up they just used staples. The skin around your skull is custom fitted and snug so imagine trying to get that all back smoothly using needle and thread. Staples make more sense, plus it’s a whole lot easier to push the skin back together with your fingers and then, ka-chunk. And apparently there are not a lot of nerve endings up there because they did it without any anesthesia and it really didn’t hurt much. Who knew?

Biker Quote for Today

Loud pipes are loud pipes.

A rough sketch showing how the CT scans looked initially and a month later.

By the time you read this I will be checked in at Swedish Medical Center to get a couple holes drilled in my head.

The most serious injury I suffered in my encounter on my CB750 with a drunk driver on June 29 was a head injury, causing some bleeding on my brain. In the time since then all my other injuries have made substantial progress toward healing; the brain bleed has gotten worse.

So the docs said we need to operate. This procedure is called a burr-hole for septural drainage. That means they will drill two holes in my skull and insert little tubes to drain away all the excess fluid that has been collecting, and in doing so, pushing my brain to the left and creating increasing pressure. Our brains are extremely delicate organs and the pressure can lead to nasty things such as migraines, seizures, vision issues, and more. We had planned to go this weekend on a family camping excursion but the docs said no, it would not be a good idea for me to be that far away from an emergency room in case things took a bad turn.

It is not clear to me at this point what the docs will do to actually stop the bleeding. Draining is good, but I don’t want to be going back once a month to have the holes reopened and drained again.

Along the way I’ve had the opportunity to make my point about nomenclature that I discussed previously. With all the customary paperwork, I was talking with a woman who was asking me all about my health history. At one point she referred to the crash as a “motorcycle accident.”

No, I stopped her, I object to that characterization of what happened. This was a drunk driving incident that had nothing to do with a motorcycle other than the fact that I was on one. If I had been on a bicycle would you refer to it as a bicycle accident? If I had been on foot would you refer to it as a pedestrian accident? I doubt it. In those cases you would say bicyclist hit by drunk driver, or pedestrian hit by drunk driver. How about motorcyclist hit by drunk driver?

Yeah, I’m a little touchy but I spent my working life as a writer and editor and I care about words, and using the right words.

Anyway, I’ll be in residence at Swedish for a few days following this procedure. Then who knows how I’ll feel and how long it will be before I’m able to get back on the bike again. I know that after heart surgery I was two months off the bikes. I don’t think that’s how this will go. After heart surgery they kept me there in the ICU for a week and it was a month before I was able to walk around the block.

Now here’s a question: how many other people do you know who have had both heart surgery and brain surgery? I figure I must be in a pretty elite group. Do your best not to join me.

Biker Quote for Today

At high speed, objects on the horizon are closer than they appear.