Joel and Drags Stag and being broken

On 27 June we headed to an Island called Saltspring for a combined stag/stagette weeknd for Joel and Drags. Ruby, Jan and I headed out after work and got in late on Friday night. Jan and Ruby were concerned that my car wasn't going to be big enough for all our shit and surprisingly it came close to being full but it still managed to eat everything.

In the morning we had a full day of sports planned. I was gifted an awesome wee insulated cup thing and I proceeded to fill it up with a delicious ceasar followed by a couple of beers. On my team was Ruby, Jonas, Ky, Whitney and Kellen. It was funny that Kellen and I ended up on the same team as we were doing a bit of shit talking towards each other the night before when we didn't even know what teams we would be on. We were team white and we had a team war cry that probably shouldn't be written on the open internet. The first activity was the Tug of war. We thought we would do OK with Jonas but the first team up we challenged had a couple of pretty big guys so we lost 2-1.

Then came my second and final activity (apart from drinking) of the day. The long jump. Somehow I managed to get off balance in the air and slip and land on my hand awkwardly. My hand hurt a bit when I got up and I was pretty disappointed that I had probably sprained it pretty bad. I was massaging it and trying to find out exactly what part was hurt when I felt some bones moving in my hand that probably shouldn't be moving. Then I decided my hand was broken, then I nearly passed out. The usual wave of "oh shit, what have I got coming up and what won't I be able to do". After declining Jonas' kind offer of fashioning a splint out of duct tape and beer bottles Salima drove me to the hospital (we luckily spotted it on our way to the cabins complete with the Jokes about good to know where it is in case someone gets hurt). Luckily they were fully equipped to deal with my broken hand and I didn't have to go back to Vancouver. I had some X-rays done and my hand started to hurt really bad while I was waiting but once they put it in a splint it started to hurt less. The doctor gave me a prescription for some Tramadol (Tarantula) and the pharmacist told me in no uncertain terms that I could not consume alcohol while on the medication. So we went to the liquor store to buy a bottle of Vodka (as you do) and headed back to the cabins.

I ended up just drinking Scotch for the rest of the night instead of taking the medication and had a pretty good time. The worst part was not being able to play guitar. I did form a sort of hilarious band called "Blair squared" with another Blair and I fretted and he strummed. Hilarious

The next few weeks were pretty shit. It was my right hand so I was pretty screwed. The worst was trying to work. As I have always used my left hand a bit on the mouse that wasn't so bad but typing was excruciating. I was probably still faster at typing with one hand as some of the other older guys though.

After some discussions with the hand specialist he gave me a choice to have surgery to fix the bones in place with a couple of screws. I opted for this as it would lead to a faster recovery. Surgery was pretty awful though. The first time I turned up, got in my gown waited for two hours and was then told that my surgery had been postponed. I was pretty guted and just wanted to have the bloody thing done. I went back a couple of days later to have it done and all went well. It was pretty weird because I only had a nerve block and some mild sedation. They used an ultrasound to look at my shoulder while they put the needle in so that they could see that the anesthetic had worked properly. Then my hole arm proceeded to become numb from the shoulder down. I couldn't feel anything and I couldn't move it. Then as they wheeled me into the OR the sedation had all but wore off. I asked the anesthesiologist if I should still be sedated and he replied with "do you want to be?" I was thinking that he was the expert. But he explained that unless I was stressing out about the whole thing he would give me as little sedative as possible which would allow me to recover quicker. The whole thing was over in about 45 min and all went well. I was then sent home for the rest of the day and the nerve block didn't wear off until about 12 hours later. I thought I had dislocated my elbow multiple times during the day as I just could feel anything or move it at all. It was like a massive warm bag of meat hanging from my shoulder.

I had a few shitty days where my hand had gone back a few steps but then I started to be able to move it a bit without it hurting. Then I started physio and it is slowly getting back to 100%. I am typing this on 15 September and it is doing OK but is starting to hurt a bit from all the words. It is also still pretty week. I think I must have sprained my middle finger pretty bad though as that is the one that hurts the most even though I broke my ring finger.

Oh well, nothing to be done about it now!

Kylie in the house!

Righto, got  a bit of catching up to do. I think this one stretches back to 9 May! Ugh.

So Miss Kylie March of Blenheim town came to see me for a whirlwind tour. She had been in Ottawa for work as she is some lah di dah NZ embassy girl. On her way back through she crashed for a night with me. I picked her up on Friday at about 6pm and we dropped her stuff at my place. For dins we went to Craft beer market which was delicious as usual. Then as we were about to head home for bed I then ascertained that my flatmate had found a watering hole in Gastown somewhere so we went to join her. After an appropriate amount of drinks there we went back to Joel and Drags place for a couple more beers before finally getting to bed around 2am or so.

The drinking on the Friday definitely impeded the Saturday plan which was to climb the chief but we didn't let a couple of hangovers stop us. We made it up in pretty good time and Kylie was pretty stoked with the view.

Then we headed down to get Kylie back to the airport. On the way we stopped for Poutine and I had her back at the terminal on time. All in all she had only been in Vancouver for 23 hours but I think it made the right impression. I'm sure she had a good sleep on the way home!