Apr 05 2014
Things I miss Things I will miss
In 2011 I had to move myself, and then my family from Albuquerque New Mexico to Massachusetts. It was a difficult time in my life. Loss of job, then cross-country job search, negotiating the offer under high pressure and tight time constraints. My wife and I had let our health insurance lapse due to the high expense, and so me driving my old 1994 Ford pickup ahead of them alone and without any health insurance and a bit paranoid something bad was going to happen to one of us or our young child in the duration between old job and new job. At the time I did have terrible back pain, unbeknownst to me I was suffering from a slipped disc, treatable but I did not yet know the cause of the pain. I had to drive much of the 2242 miles with my butt off the seat, arched and contorted. Probably not the safest driving though I had no incidents.
I had only a month or two to discover if the Massachusetts company that had hired me was good/stable/secure/sane enough to warrant moving my wife and son and 10,000 pounds of our crud cross country. I loved Albuquerque, though for sure it was not without its issues. Those of you who have watched the Breaking Bad series will have some understanding. Drugs were not as visible as in the TV show, but I knew enough people with substance abuse to resonate with the general theme. One thing that was accurate - the level of crime. The Breaking Bad glorifies it and Hollywood-ifies it, but in fact there was and I presume still is high crime rate in Albuquerque. We lived in a nice neighborhood, somewhat near downtown, yet we were periodically and regularly the victim of property crime. Luckily that was all that we suffered, but I never got used to it. I was always on my guard, waiting and watching for the next thing. A lot of people own guns there. Even your mild mannered next door Grandma has a gun. But I live in Disneyland now in the cold dense woods of New England. There is no crime here. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ratio of Albuquerque gun owners is 2x or 3x or even 10x the number of gun owners here. Yet even with all this, I loved that place. New Mexico is always sunny. The desert beautiful in its stark harsh living. One would not like living in Albuqueruque not liking or at least tolerating the color of UPS brown. The plants are brown. The dirt is brown. The buildings are brown. The people brown. The air is crisp and clean and you can see forever. The light is fantastically beautiful in myriad ways.
One of my prized possessions and take-away from my years in Albuquerque is a 2011 Triumph Thunderbird Storm motorcycle.
New Mexico is the ideal place to ride. Eight months per year, with 29 out of 30 perfect riding days per month. There are winding mountain roads leading to 10,000 foot vistas. Back country highways that stretch forever. I would sometimes start my day with a ride up Central Ave (Rte. 66) heading West out past the city limits. Five miles out of town the houses would melt and disappear until only scrub and a handful of businesses remained. I would arrive at the foot of a long 2 mile uphill grade. At which point I would gun it. The engine would scream and the Storm would shoot like a rocket. The acceleration nerve wracking and within seconds the odometer reading 100 mph. A terrifying thrill I would be white knuckle gripping the handlebars hunched low in the frame. My leather jacket tight as I could on my body but still wind whipped like a sail. After arriving at the top, exhilarated I would turn around and head back to start work, or if I was feeling particularly decadent ride North for a spin around Double Eagle Airport to watch small planes land at the strip. Nirvanna. Heaven on Earth.
And yet, it was short lived. Two months after buying the Storm my position was eliminated. I’ve lost a few jobs in my career, lifetime, but this was a particularly apple-cart upsetting one. Reason: I was tired of that unsure feeling of where the next job would come from. I was tired of the small high-tech industry there, mostly contract-to-government Sandia spin-offs. No job security. Thus began my cross country job search. Luckily I have Masters in Computer Science and even at the height, the worst part of the Great Recession, I was getting good solid leads and flown out on the interviewing company’s dime. It was hard though. Way out of practice at interviewing and in a rush to replace the lost wadges and insurance, several choice positions went by the wayside. The worst was not getting an offer to work for one of the top 10 companies in California. Live and learn. My favorite missed opportunity was with one of the high-speed algorithmic trading firms in Chicago. Long story but suffice it to say I discovered yet another industry that has money to burn, even in the middle of the recession it seemed as if it were the opposite for that company. Astounding. The other industry that never seems to run out of money is the government of course. Sandia was a fiscal conservative tax-payers nightmare. A great place to work if you are a worker. Not so great if you are on the outside. But more on Sandia in a future post. In any event I did finally secure a good, very apropos position at a company, in of all places my home growing-up town in Massachusetts. I still have family in this area, so it made sense to take the job, and move back home, so to speak.
And so I brought my darling 2011 Thunderbird Storm with me. Had it specially crated and shipped at great expense so that I could enjoy the rides among the New England evergreens and pines. The rolling hills. The beautiful lush green landscape. Ahh the joy of it, or so I thought. That is until I had to move four times in 2 years. What a royal pain in the butt to rent single-family housing in this area! Finally we sold our house in Albuquerque, bought a nice house in a suburb of Boston, with room for the Storm. The summer ended, and with all the upheaval I think I only took the Storm for about 10 rides in that two-year period, and that included commutes in to work.
BUT finally we were settled. I was imagining and daydreaming of the rides that this spring and summer would bring. The pure utter joy. In prep over the winter I decide to try to “get back in shape”. The motorcycle is heavy at 746 pounds. I’m not a big guy so I need to be in strong shape to handle the monster, to feel safe riding it. I would need my strong legs to lift it were I to ever drop it. First some simple solo exercising. Then a friend tells me about an old-mans pickup basketball at a nearby town that he plays in. Very mellow he tells me. Ages range from around 40 to 70. Yeah! I think. That puts me right in the middle. So after hemming and hawing for a few weeks I finally make it to a game. It’s been years since I played but have a blast. I want to take it easy and only play in two games before heading home. I felt soo good, soo alive that even though both Achilles are very sore I commit to making it to the weekend game. It was the 2nd game of the morning — Goldman has the ball, drives the lane, fakes the defender quickly moving left, when pop! On the ground with that confused look of, “what the heck fell on my ankle from the ceiling of the gym!?” The other guys head over — “what happened?” I dunno I reply, I fell, my ankle hurts. A couple of the veterans bend over, peer at my right leg for a second or two and pronounce: Achilles.
And so, that brings me to today approximately six weeks later. The spring is coming, but so is the beginning of my rehab. The Storm slumbers under my porch in its weather-proof cocoon. Waiting for the warm weather. Waiting to be ridden, fast. Waiting to shine in the sun. But by whom?
10 responses so far
Interesting story! Hopefully this is just a bump in the long road of rides on the Storm ahead.
Or you could try to make it as a writer…
I like to code and write software too much to write stories for a living. But an idea… maybe for when/if I move back to Albuquerque and retire.
Speaking of vocation ideas — Norm have you ever tried to make money off your ATR experience/knowledge/wisdom? Just curious if you ever tried, or if you prefer it as a hobby.
Thanks for the suggestion, Jon. No, I’ve never given it any thought (though I think somebody else also suggested it a little while back). Can’t imagine a business model, actually, and reasonably happy with my addiction to the gang here.
Thanks Rob, I am dying to get out of my third cast (one pre- surgery, splint-cast post surgery, and now 2nd post surgical cast). Though all things considered I am feeling better than I have in six weeks. Getting good sleeps. Almost no pain, excepting the fiberglass poking in to my flesh. Nerve rebuilding electric shocking sensation almost gone. Joints less sore from favoring the right leg. My wife is sick of me ranting a bit Re: that if my doc does not want me out of the cast yet, he better have a phenomenally good reason to recast me this coming Tue appointment, or I am switching to another Doctor.
Norm: you could become a Doctor. I was toying with the idea the other day, except not thrilled with having to go back to school for 5 or 6 years. I was trash-talking my Dad (who is a retired physician) that I now knew more about medicine than he did, at least in the area of Achilles tendon and surgical prep and preventing complications. I was basing my knowledge on the five weeks of readings of this web site and the dozen papers I’ve read or skimmed. So I guess it’s a bit of trash talk
Ya, I don’t think my going to med school a few years past MD-retirement age is in the cards, Jon!
But most MDs have to be cognizant of so many different areas, diseases, injuries, body parts, etc. (even OSs, not just GPs), that it’s not that tough to be more expert than the vast majority of them in one small area, like ATRs. Of course, people who have a psychological need for a god-like omnicient authority figure to direct their care (which includes a LOT of us!) don’t want to face that evident truth. But there’s enough research activity in every tiny field of medicine — even a relatively boring, low-budget, non-life-threatening one like ATRs — that it’s not easy for a mostly-retired OCD ATR addict like me to keep up, not to mention an overworked practicing MD!
Here’s a frustration of mine that may interest a techie guy like you: There’s a huge body of evidence, most of it old, documenting the inferior results of old-fashioned slow non-op “conservative casting” for ATR treatment. And there’s another body of evidence — quite new (>2007), quickly growing, and already substantial and convincing — documenting the first-rate results of new-fangled fast non-op ATR treatment.
Comparing those two bodies of evidence, it is clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that the fast non-op protocols deliver reliably low rerupture rates and excellent strength and ROM, and that slow non-op treatment has unacceptably high rerupture rates. In other words, non-op results depend very heavily on the speed of the non-op protocol used: up to a pretty fast point, the faster protocols produce fewer reruptures — in defiance of all the normal human “fast is risky, slow is safe” knee jerks.
BUT… because there is not (AFAIK) a SINGLE randomized trial that actually directly compared fast non-op treatment with slow non-op treatment, the medical scientific community refuses to state this obvious fact as proven or true!!
E.g., an excellent recent meta-study headed by a young woman from Montreal — the first meta-study that compared op to non-op results AND made the vital distinction between the slow bad non-op studies and the fast good ones — refused to state clearly that fast modern non-op treatment is way better than slow old-fashioned non-op treatment!
What they did say is that fast modern non-op treatment produces results that are comparable to post-op results, while slow old-fashioned non-op treatment produces results that are inferior to post-op results!
In their prose summary and press comments, they also made the same distinction: They advised new ATR patients whose clinics practice fast modern non-op treatment to skip the surgery and go non-op, while advising new ATR patients whose clinics DON’T practice fast modern non-op treatment to choose the surgery. But they never advised ATR patients who are being given slow old-fashioned non-op treatment to switch doctors or clinics so they can get GOOD treatment!
I think I understand this infuriating gap, because something isn’t considered proven until a RCT proves it, and we don’t have that here. But if A=B (or even A>B) and C<<B, there’s a simple mathematical rule that lets us conclude that C<<A, so why can’t we all state that obvious conclusion?!?
In this case, I think the niceties of scientific protocol actually PREVENT medical scientists from stating the obvious truth, even if they are paying enough attention to notice it. Since that truth is so clear and so clinically significant — many ATR patients are still getting slow non-op treatments that have unacceptably high rerupture rates, and the evidence is compelling that they can make their lives way better by speeding it up — that this academic nicety is doing real harm to real people in the real world. AAARGH!
BTW, concerning your own post-op “conservative casting”: My reading of the evidence suggests that going slow post-op is NOT clinically harmful the way going slow non-op is. It’s mostly short-term pain for no gain, or maybe for a small loss. Several good studies are linked on this site’s protocols and studies page, for your review. But at best, you are suffering an unnecessary nuisance by going much slower than (say) bit.ly/UWOProtocol.
It’s also logical to think that you’ll have more calf-muscle atrophy and ankle instability than if you’d gone faster, though (a) I’m aware of no evidence to prove it, and (b) the stories here show mostly that both atrophy and instability develop shockingly quickly, and usually take surprisingly long to reverse.
Norm, thanks for the long response and continued information to fill in my knowledge gaps in this area. Re: Doctor suggestion - I wasn’t completely serious but hey somebody out there is going to make the high end age i.e. your age, if they have not already done so, entrance into medical school
hey Norm, I was re-reading your post about fast non-op vs. slow non-op, and you write this sentence: “I think I understand this infuriating gap, because something isn’t considered proven until a RCT proves it…”
What does RCT stand for?
Randomized Control(led) Trial. Sorry!