On February 10, 1996 I was out for a routine training ride with my wife (or so I thought). Even though it was February, it was quite warm and the roads were clear -- until we got to a spot where poor drainage had caused an ice patch on the road. Unfortunately, I didn't stop in time to miss the ice and I crashed. Nine out of ten times, it probably would have just been a minor crash, but I went down very hard and sustained a triple fracture of my left femur. I was taken to the hospital and later that day had surgery to implant hardware to hold everything together.
I was in the hospital for five days. Only days after I got home from the hospital, our neighbor's car crashed into the front of our house, causing enough damage to total the car and force us to have the front wall of our house rebuilt. Hopefully, we used up about ten years worth of bad karma within a couple of weeks!
I was on crutches for two months, during which time I lost about fifteen pounds of muscle mass in my leg, but I compensated for this with fat! I was rehabbing like mad the whole two months (the surgeon let me start riding an indoor trainer after only two weeks) but it wasn't until I was able to start walking again that I really started to get strength back. I gained six pounds the first week as I put muscle back on!
I did pretty well during the summer of '96, but I didn't really fully recover until I had the hardware taken out in the fall. That got rid of a bunch of little nagging problems that had driven my physical therapist nuts! Once I healed up from the second surgery I finally felt pretty normal again. These days the main reminder I have is an impressive scar on my leg from the surgeries and a little voice warning me to be careful about ice!
Okay, here are the pictures.
Last updated August 6, 1998.