I've been off the bike for few weeks as I'm just plain ol' burnt out for now. I've been back in the gym and started to do some Olympic style lifting and gotten back into hockey, which is just what I needed. What I didn't need is to get the news that I had always been a bit curious about.
About four years ago, at the last NORBA National in Sand Point, ID I took a couple consecutive nasty hits to my right shoulder. One was during qualifying when I pegged a tree in a straightaway and the other is during the actual race run when I looped out off of a drop and fell flat on my back/right shoulder from 6' up. I'll be honest, both sucked. Weeks and months after my right shoulder was still tender, but I was quickly regaining full range of motion, so I figured it was just a bad separation. I've had them before and they just need time to heal. Shortly after, the crunching started. I chose to ignore it. Then it started to freeze at night when I was on my side. I chose to ignore that too.
Fast forward three states and four years later, the crunching and freezing still ongoing, but by this time I've just learned to deal with it as a minor annoyance. I've got full range of motion; can do everything I normally do so why bother?
That's when my curiosity got the better of me. I was coming out of the gym, which share space with a physical therapy/chiropractic office. They happened to take my insurance, were nice and seemed to know what they were talking about. I booked an appointment, they took x-rays, they asked all kinds of questions, and then they finally put the x-rays up for me to see.
Now, I'm no geologist, but even I could see that something was amiss. "Um, shouldn't there be a connection between that and that?" I asked, pointing to where the clavicle and scapula should have been joined. "Yes." Said the doctor. "And you see those little flecks of white? Those are bone fragments that once were part of either of those two bones. Basically the end of your clavicle snapped off." "So...my collarbone is just kinda floating around by itself in there? Ugggghh..."
So, the good news is that right now I don't need surgery because it's been so long and there's really not a whole lot that can be done. I'll just be rehabbing the shoulder because, upon measuring the strength of both, it's much much weaker than the left. We'll see how it goes. I just don't want to be 65 and then need to have it fixed!
The funny thing is, I remember saying to my friend, True after I hit the tree, "Man, That was a hard hit! I can't believe that I didn't break my collarbone!" Yeah.
