Journals, photos, mapping stuff from my Garmin and Strava, philosophical ramblings, and good experiences.
From Bruce as he undertakes off-road, gravel-road, fire-trail journeys and camps out in Australia’s wilderness. Escaping from city life, mental health struggles, and Covid-19 stress.
It was a hard decision to sell my Road Bike
After a devastating fall, permanently damaging my left shoulder it was time to sell my road bike. Time to admit I couldn’t balance on those skinny tyres anymore, and time to accept that I wouldn’t be safe trying to reach the drop-style handlebars. Yes, I’ve experienced many many hard falls over a lifetime of riding, both on my road bike and my mountain bike. Is it because I take more risks than others? Or maybe I have a poor ability to maintain balance and recover once something starts to go wrong? I certainly do have more falls than any of my family or peer group. I’m famous for it.
Up to now I usually sustain bruises or scrape off some skin. About two years ago one of my mountain-bike crashes on the Western Wedgetail trail on Mount Stromlo resulted in me needing face surgery and tungsten straps inserted to support my eye socket. That was pretty scary for my wife, Rita, and our family. But I was soon back on the horse.
This time seemed fairly innocuous. The valve stem on the front tyre was gummed up with a little Stan’s No Tubes fluid that had gone gummy. I should have been more diligent about maintaining it. So the front tyre suddenly deflated going into a corner. It was just two streets away from home at the beginning of a training ride. The front-wheel washed out in the turn and I was suddenly on the deck, sliding on the course-gravelled bitumen. Bang! My shoulder bashed into the curb and it was dislocated.
Six hours of waiting in Calvary Hospital’s emergency rooms for a resuscitation room to be free, where the young doctor could use anaesthetic to knock meet out was an awful ordeal. Copious amounts of morphine and fentanyl every 45 minutes seemed to do nothing to ease the pain. Then once they were able to knock me out, it only took a few minutes to manipulate the shoulder joint back from being in front of my chest to its normal position. When I woke up, a mere 15 minutes after I was finally admitted to the resuscitation room, all the pain had miraculously gone away. Yeah, but I was so wired from the painkillers that I remained on full-on hyper-alert for the next 36 hours.
Since that day, 05 January 2021, I really haven’t had any shoulder pain. However, even after months of diligent physiotherapy, my range of movement failed to recover. Eventually, I went for an MRI and a visit to a specialist orthopaedic surgeon. She pronounced my shoulder to be inoperable. Two tendons were ruptured, snapped completely away from the bone and retracted. Given my age, nearly 70, and the several months’ gap in time after incurring the injury, the tendons had atrophied away. Dr Gorbiev described the tendons as, “Like Wet Kleenex.” It meant that she would never be able to hook onto the tendons and stretch them back into place and reattach them to the bone, because they would just snap off again.
So, I sold the lovely custom-built road bike that I got for my 60th birthday….