Head Over Bars

Wait! Something besides photos?  Yes, today Right and Left Brain talk about their recent bicycle wreck...

Left Brain:  For about the last year or so, we have been biking to work almost every day.  It's been great exercise:  10 miles each way.  Right Brain doesn't even complain too much, because we get to look at things other than car tail lights.  We've even gone out on some Saturday morning rides as well.  It's been fun, and we've lost about 30 lbs.

Right Brain:  The rides can be interesting and fun, particularly when Left Brain isn't so wrapped up in how many microseconds have elapsed since we left home...

Left Brain:  Unfortunately, this past Tuesday we had an unfortunate run-in with the road.  About 7 miles into the 10 mile ride home, the front tire spontaneously went flat.  We still aren't sure why.  It may have gone flat slowly over the course of the ride, but we didn't notice anything.  It happened to go flat right as we were turning a corner in a residential area.

Right Brain:  Before Left Brain gets into a long discussion about physics and gravity and intertia, let me cut to the chase:  we lost control of the bike, and flew over the handle bars, landing squarely on our chin.

Left Brain:  You always cut out the interesting parts!  The chin sustained a decent gash.  Some friends riding with us made us stay down on the cement, and applied pressure to the cut.  We also noticed that we had some major damage to our teeth.  We decided to call an ambulance.

Right Brain:  You left off the part about how we always wear our helmet!  But it didn't seem to do us a lot of good, because we hit our chin, not the top part of our head.  No damage to Left or Right.

Left Brain:  Hey  Right, remember how every doctor and nurse in the ER asked if we had been wearing a helmet?  I'm pretty glad we were anyway.  You never know what could have happened...

Right Brain:  So we made it through the ER after a short ambulance ride, and they took some X-rays, and determined that we had broken our jaw, and had broken several teeth.  (Too bad we don't have the X-rays, or we could post them.)  They sewed up our chin, gave us a perscription for high-power pain killers and antibiotics, and made an appointment with a plastic surgeon to repair the jaw.

Left Brain:   So, we left and have been on a liquid diet ever since.  By our count, seven of our teeth are split or half gone.  Three more are pushed down into the gum.  Three more are rotated, chipped or otherwise damaged.  

Right Brain:  We spoke with the plastic surgeon on Thursday, who said he didn't think we had a jaw fracture, and instructed us to come back in a couple of weeks, and in the mean time to see a dentist.

Left Brain:  We went to see the dentist that same day, who bent over backwards to get us appointments today with an Oral Surgeon, and with an Endodontist.  The Oral Surgeon took new X-rays, and stated that we definitely have a fractured jaw.  We had to go to the Endodontist to get one of the tooth fragments removed, along with a partial root-canal, so we can close our mouth enough to let the Oral Surgeon see if our bite is affected, and that dictates the next steps for treatment of the jaw (surgery, wire the  jaw closed, or just "don't chew hard foods...). We may be looking, in the long term, at up to a year of treatments between the dentist, oral surgeon and endodontist to fix our mouth, though.

Right Brain:  We have some powerful pain medication from the ER, and that sometimes we feel nausea, but only if we get off schedule do we feel much pain.  So that's a good thing.  We usually have several good hours each day.  Hopefully soon we will not need those pills, though.  Hopefully we'll be able to go back to work next week sometime.

Right Brain:  As a consequence of not being able to work for the past few days, we have had some time to work on scanning slides.  Hopefully this will result in some photos being posted to the blog shortly, after a long hiatus!  I'm blaming Left Brain for getting distracted....