Okay, this story is getting tiresome so I’ll be finished with it now.

So, after the first draining on the Friday (13 days after crash), I was feeling good and decided to do a local one day, 2 stage event on sunday. I did a 15km TT in the morning then a 60km road race in the afternoon. The TT went well, I was 2nd behind Merrill who is always strong. The road race was okay too. I got in trouble with my doctor on Monday as she said “riding is good but not intense riding and what if you crashed on it again, you could do some big damage” I was like “but there were only 10 people in the race and it was all left hand turns…”.

Anyway,the hematoma was filling up again so we decided to lance again on Wednesday morning. We did. Driving my mom home later that day I started to feel feverish. It kept getting worse and by the time we got to her house I laid down on the couch with 2 blankets and shivered (no, my mom doesn’t even have air conditioning). Finally I agreed to let my sister take me to the hospital and they checked me out and said “yep, it’s infected”. This doctor conferred with another and they decided the best thing to do was to “pack it”. That is, pack it with mesalt gauze to draw out the fluid and let it continually drain and not fill up. This meant daily visits to the wound care nurse along with 10 days of antibiotics. Fun stuff. I got used to the daily unpacking, irrigation and packing but it meant no swimming and no proper shower at first. I have a good dressing on it now that I can shower with. This dressing is something most cyclists would covet for road rash, it kicks tegaderm’s butt! Actually, most cyclists, if given the opportunity would pillage that wound care clinic, lots of good goodies in there!!

So, the up side to these happenings is I won’t have a growth hanging off my hip for a few years (if not forever) but the down side is I couldn’t go to Altoona because of the daily visits to the nurse. I also had to take some time off to let the 3cm radius pocket to close a bit. I took 9 days off and it did close a fair amount in that time. I would say it’s been a little slower healing since I started riding again. I’m down to 1.2cm radius now though and every 3 days to visit. I’m hoping to have only one or two more visits left.

So, I am training again, lots. I have committed to going to worlds in Austria so that means I must ride. I don’t know what I was thinking when I made that decision but whatever. Two months left in my cycling career then a BIG party. I am struggling with a training prescription that calls for “double days”. I am waaaay too lazy for double days…

I guess I'll deal, only 2 more months after all then I can finally get all the things accomplished that I been wanting to do forever, or not. That's a big list. Anyway, in the meantime I've posted a picture from I don't know when (a few years ago, it could be anytime between 2001 and 2003). It's from the Plouay world cup when I was staying at the same hotel as Jaja and so was Catherine Marsal (who is a friend of his) so I got a photo with him. He was pretty cool and I have always been a fan of his, I'm such a groupie. Not really a groupie but it was pretty cool.

That's all for now. I have Bank of America in Charlotte N.C. this weekend. It'll be nice to see the team since I missed Altoona. I hope they remember me.