Quote Originally Posted by sundial View Post
Ya gotta share at least ONE memorable moment in the natural world. C'mon, pretty please?
Oh.....

Bicycle wrecks, two stand out.

First one, I was 14 years old, riding down the hill. This kid from my high school (on foot) wanted to play chicken. He got out of the way. His fishing line didn't, and it caught my handlebar. Badly sprained shoulder that will never be right (no such thing as reconstructing ligaments in those days). I think it was three weeks that I had to pick my right hand up with my left hand and put it on my school desk so I could write.

Fast forward 15 years. I'm riding a touring bike, but this friend of mine has decided he's going to get me into racing. Well, okay. We drive out to the state park, do some downhill intervals, and then we're doing a simulated crit in the parking lot. Only nobody's told me that the inside pedal is supposed to be up in the corners, especially on a long-wheelbase, low bottom bracket touring bike. So I stick a pedal in a corner at 21 mph and that's the last thing I remember. The way he tells it, all my forward momentum got translated into straight up. I'm launched five feet into the air, jackknife front to back, then turn upside down and land head first, with sparks coming out of the strap rivet on my helmet. Next thing I remember is 25 minutes later - this is the days before cell phones - he's spent the first 15 minutes completely freaked as I vocalized unintelligibly, then once I became responsive, checked me as best he could for spinal cord injury (none, thank goodness) and decided the best thing to do was to go ahead and get his truck and take me to the ER. The guy who owns my LBS still has the helmet I was wearing that day, and shows people the inch-deep depression in the EPS liner so they can see just what it is that a helmet is for.

Latest injury I'm dealing with is not cycling related.

We were painting our living room. I picked up a ladder.

Didn't drop it, didn't twist it, just picked it up. And the edge of the rung caught me wrong in the meat of my thumb, and bruised a tendon and a nerve. Which might've been okay except for the ortho's advice to immobilize the hand, and so, more than two years later, I have lingering tendinitis in both elbows.

Okay, okay, one more. I cut my thumb peeling an acorn squash, midway between the MCP and IP joints. It was pretty deep and bled profusely, but it wasn't into the tendon or anything, so I just bandaged it and wound up with a scar contracture that took a year to loosen up. A few months later I'm at my doctor's for something unrelated, and I show it to her, and she says...

"Why would you peel a squash?"

..........

But anyway, Beth, I had allergic reactions three times after eating at one particular restaurant in my town. It's the only times I've ever had an anaphylactoid reaction to food (I have the other type of slow-burn reaction to lots of foods, and once had an anaphylactoid reaction to a wasp sting). No idea what it is the restaurant used, but it's obviously not any common allergen or it would've been more than those three times. The first time it happened, I'd actually taken some aspirin after lunch and thought that that's what I was reacting to - my medical charts still flag an aspirin allergy, and honestly I haven't tested it to be sure I'm *not* allergic to aspirin. But after the next two times, I'm pretty sure it was the lunch, not the pills. So it might not've been your squid or my aspirin, but who the heck knows, maybe some kind of mold that grows in that restaurant. Weird.