Yet more accident info

After a few comments and e-mails from people who read my blog I finally got around to posting an update on how my accident is going. I had the pins taken out and that is all started to heal over, my bruised ribs are healed, and my left thumb is starting to knit together. Before I left after having the pins taken out I managed to get a printout of the x-ray of my arm with the pins still in it - here's what it looked like:



After the pins were taken out the nurse offered to let me keep them. Normally the hospital keeps them but she said, "you look like the kind of person who would like to take these as a souvenir". So, this is what I had in my arm for several weeks - and yes, it is about the diameter of a bicycle spoke, for scale.



I'm now starting to cut down on my painkillers, I went to the doctor and she said I should cut down on them after giving me a prescription for 60 tablets. This is also the doctor who said "I don't want to worry you are thinking of brain cancer". As a result, I think most of the pills are going to end up going back to the pharmacy. I'm almost off the painkillers now and I'm feeling quite a bit that as a result. The painkillers made me quite dozy and tired so it makes quite a change not to be sleeping around 15 hours a day.

I am pretty stuck right now but I is essentially only have four fingers to type with, and the speech recognition doesn't work too well with UNIX commands such as ls *txt | awk {'print "mv -vi $1" "$1".old"'} | sh - try to read that count, and the dictation software ends up with: LS Stott TXT type or left curly bracket quote print will quote MV -- GRI L-1 quarks" tall one.old quote" right curly bracket part shell. Unsurprisingly the computer find this difficult to understand.

I'm now off work until the end of June and I will be able to run my bike until the middle of July. This puts the kibosh on my plans to ride my bike from Port aux Basque to Cornerbrook in the summer with my father when my parents come to visit.

I managed to see a couple of brief flashes of critical mass on Friday last from a couple of WebCams in downtown Halifax. He said came over before and and picked up the bicycle trailer for his son - I'm pretty sure that was him that I saw pulling a trailer, hopefully Owen is enjoying it.

To answer some comments on the blog:

Revrunner, Nova Scotia has a $2500 pain-and-suffering cap. From talking to the insurance people I'll get the full amount, plus all my expenses reimbursed.

Dougii, I'd be interested in following up on it but I suspect it's now too long in the pins come out of it. I have the accident number written down somewhere, if you think that would do any good let me know and I'll e-mail it over - I'd be interested to know if the guy ended up getting a ticket or not.

Michelle, I medical expenses are currently running at around $300. Most of those are from the ambulance ride, which cost me $120. Most of the other stuff is just odds and ends of costs that aren't covered by health insurance, but will be paid by the other guys insurance when I make a claim.

Timo, I run my own server so I host my images on my own machine. Your best bet if you are looking for something free is probably to look at something like Flickr.

Ludwig, this is my second major accident in the past year. In total, I think I'm up to around 10 accidents of varying severity. Halifax is unfortunately not a particularly bike friendly city, at least not when one gets out of the downtown core and cars start speeding up and stop paying attention. All I can really do is wait for the oil to run out.