Against the Odds

by John L. Pendergrass

  As summer slowly fades into autumn, the Longleaf Trace, our local rails-to-trails project, is finally clear of debris, and I start back riding a bit. The trail is 41 miles long and heavily wooded, so it takes longer than expected for the crews to finish the job.

  Thanksgiving weekend rolls around, just three months post-Katrina. It’s one of those picture-perfect times that pop up frequently in Mississippi in the fall. My family is at home, the food is delicious, the weather is gorgeous—this is a time to be thankful.

  I’m out one afternoon with our local bike group, finishing a pleasant 40 mile ride. There are a dozen or so riders and we are only one mile from the finish. Everyone is cooling down, talking back and forth, about to wrap things up. We’re riding probably 15 or 16 miles per hour, slightly disorganized, but nothing intense.

  I’m talking, laughing, not paying close attention to the other riders. Then it happens, my front wheel hits the rear wheel of the biker in front of me and I go down.

  “Here we go again,” I think, in that fraction of a second between bike contact and ground contact. I’ve had maybe three other falls in my brief cycling career and I know they’re no fun.

  It never fails, the ground hurts like hell. When you’re in your sixties, everything is painful. I could fall on one of those special mattresses they show on television and not even knock over the glass of red wine at the other end yet still manage to injure myself. When you’re young and you fall, you bounce; when you’re old and you fall, you break.

  My left elbow is cut pretty good and my left hip and shoulder are bruised and sore.

  My first big thought is: “I’ve just thrown $1,000 out the window.” I haven’t met a dime of my health insurance deductible for the year and I know the emergency room will have the meter running from the moment I hit the door. My $1,000 will be swallowed up by the ER in no time at all.

  I start to ride the last mile to the finish and then drive myself to the ER, but one of my friends insists on taking me. Everyone is treating me just like you would treat a little old lady who has stumbled crossing the street.

  During the ride to the hospital I mull things over, cursing the trenchant unfairness of life. After a bicycle accident I always feel like a fool and an idiot.

  I’ll admit I’m a bigger dunce than most cyclists, but my story isn’t unique. Anyone who has ridden a bike for any length of time at all has a crash story. I’ve seen two friends and neighbors killed in bicycle accidents in my lifetime, and I’ve read of dozens of others. Unfortunately, it’s not an uncommon story.

  I pummel myself mercilessly all the way to the hospital, now it’s the ER’s turn.

  Emergency rooms are designed to pile frustration and delay on top of pain and suffering. I muddle through the long waits and the trip to the x-ray department. The ER physician turns out to be Patrick, the little kid my son’s age who grew up across the street from me. My hip, shoulder, and elbow all hurt, but not too badly. I’m ready to get sutured up so I can go home and brood some more.

  I’m sitting patiently in the ER trauma room, wondering what I’ll eat for supper that evening, when in walks my new best friend, Dr. Con.

  Dr. Con is a tall, lanky, middle-aged man from New Jersey. His travels brought him to Hattiesburg to practice hand surgery but he’s the orthopedic surgeon on call and he has to take care of anything that comes in off the street, even geriatric bicyclists.

  He brings good news; my shoulder is fine, just a bruise, it should heal with time. He also brings bad news: my hip is broken. I have an open comminuted elbow fracture. I’ll need two separate surgeries. I’ll have to spend at least five days in the hospital.

  Dr. Con doesn’t really use the good news/bad news bit; he is delivering all bad tidings. He starts by telling me all the complications that are looming in the background—loss of elbow function, osteomyelitis, avascular necrosis of the hip with hip replacement surgery. There are a lot of bad things out there, and they are all waiting to strike me. He even points out, by golly, that people die from this surgery.

  Ho-ho-ho, Merry Christmas to you too, Dr. Con. The official Christmas shopping season has just begun, and I may not ever see it end. By the time Santa arrives I may be dead. My family and my bicycle could be in deep mourning.

  This whole business is a big change for me. Practically all my life, I’ve been the physician, I’ve hardly ever had to play the role of the patient. This is my first major surgery, my first real stay in the hospital. I have spent my entire professional life acting like I knew what I’m doing and getting away with it. Now I’m on the receiving end. It’s amazing what you notice from the other side of the fence. Little things that never register when you’re a physician are big deals when you are the patient. Small kindnesses and benign oversights are magnified many times over.

  This is my first ever general anesthesia. I’ve operated on thousands of patients in my lifetime, usually using a local anesthetic, but sometimes employing a general. It’s still an eye-opener; one minute I’m talking to my wife in the pre-op area, seemingly a brief moment later I’m awake in the recovery room. Dr. Con uses his drills, hammers, and chisels for several hours, but I never know it.

  After surgery, I don’t have to worry about getting up to go to the bathroom anymore. When I awake in the recovery room, I see that I’m sporting a brand new shiny urinary catheter. A giant orange tube snakes from my most precious private part down to a bag of amber fluid hanging on my bedside, a true surprise.

  Obviously this isn’t all that great, but surprisingly it really isn’t all that bad either. Since I have an open fracture, I’m receiving $20,000 worth of intravenous antibiotics (I check the hospital bill when I get home), and this keeps me from picking up a urinary tract infection. I think Dr. Con forgets that I have a catheter, so I enjoy the privilege of the house for a full three days.

  Instead of lying in bed needing to take a leak, I lie in bed and hurt like hell. I do have a patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) pump, one of modern medicine’s great achievements. This little gadget gives me an instant intravenous hit of pain medicine whenever I push a button. I could have used one of these when I was climbing Heartbreak Hill in Switzerland. In theory, it works great, better pain relief with less medicine. In reality, I get the entry level PCA pump when I need the deluxe, supercharged model. My thumb is sore from pressing the button. I hurt a lot more after the surgery than I did before. Dr. Con tells me I have a bad injury, and that I should be glad that he did everything he could to fix it.

  This whole bicycle accident is a giant nightmare—multiple surgeries, near constant pain, ugly tubes sticking in and out of my body, hardly any sleep. However, there is one beneficial result, one unexpected consequence that makes it almost worthwhile. Dr. Con and I become close, personal friends.

  Dr. Con is an orthopedic surgeon, and according to the Hippocratic Oath, he is limited to a maximum of one minute with each patient when making rounds. Dr. Con soon starts spending one minute and thirty seconds, sometimes even two minutes, with me on his daily visit. We laugh, we joke, we remember those old medical school days.

  The bond strengthens.

  Many people don’t realize that being a physician is a lot like being in a college fraternity. You have all your fellow brothers to pal around with and share the good times.

  Throughout my recovery, Dr. Con, my close friend and brother, orders plenty of x-rays. The Hippocratic Oath also requires at least one x-ray per day when hospitalized. Dr. Con has done one hell of a job, and he wants to make sure that nothing comes undone. These giant pins in my hip and these wires and plates in my elbow could slip out of place in an instant.

  Sometimes we talk about my fractured bones. Of course, I don’t call them the “hip bone” or the “elbow bone,” I use the real names, the femur and the olecranon. The hardest part of becoming a physician is learning the fancy names for everything. With patients you can use whatever name comes to mind (“Madam, you have an acetabulum in your eye”), but with fellow physicians you
need to be a little more precise. The more of these big words you can string together, the better it sounds. I’m not sure if Dr. Con is impressed or not. He leaves the room before I can find out.

  At day five I’m finally able to go home. It’s great to shower and shave. There are no mirrors in the hospital. I stare at my bathroom mirror and a skid row derelict looks back. You can’t really get clean in a hospital. Everything about me has the smell of death; I look like someone has fished me out of the gutter.

  My family treats me like a king, they bring me anything I want. I lie in bed for hours reading but after a while I get bored. A weak mind like mine can absorb only so much of the written word at one time.

  Life turns into an endless procession of hollow days. I fire up the television and start watching CNBC, the business channel. The stock numbers are so repetitious that they nearly put me to sleep. I channel surf, taking in everything the medium has to offer. Daytime television is often dismissed as pathetic and trivial, but that is an understatement, it’s really a lot worse than that. It’s death by a thousand soap operas, game shows, and talk shows.

  I shouldn’t have worried; salvation is really just around the corner. At day seven, I notice I can stand up and walk around without too much pain. At day eight, I drive to my office and check my mail, at day nine I ride the stationary bike for thirty minutes. Life is looking a lot better since I got out of the hospital.

  At day 14, I go back to work and start back swimming, and at day 21, I jog a mile at the track.

  Although there’s no extra credit for getting well quickly, I’m just happy to be able to exercise. The combination of injury and age can be an irreversible liability. I never knew how it would all turn out.

  MY BROKEN bones have mended and I’m back to swimming, biking, and running. I give thanks every day for the fact that I’m still able to work out. I know that a hip fracture can be the beginning of the end, a terminal event for someone my age. Still, I have to face reality, I’m not the man I used to be.

  Since I’ve started back running, I’m a good minute per mile slower. It’s all a little perplexing, because everything feels the same as before. I’m still stiff and sore when I start, an hour run still feels like an hour run, this much effort still produces that much shortness of breath. Nothing seems all that different, it’s just that my stopwatch reads a minute per mile slower than it did last year. Sometimes I wonder if I should buy a new watch.

  I am already pretty slow so I don’t have a lot of cushion in my run time. In fact, I am quickly becoming a permanent fixture in the back of the pack, a man whose arrival heralds the end of the race.

  I draw on clever strategies derived from the wisdom of my years to fight this drop in performance. First, I double up on my vitamins (if only life were this simple), then I buy a new pair of running shoes, then I train a little harder, then something starts to hurt and I’m forced to take time off to recover. I re-calibrate my goals and go about my business; my mind quits making commitments that my body can’t keep. Reality has a way of tempering expectations: you are what you are.

  I can’t complain, though. The two years following my bike accident are not bad at all. I get more and more accustomed to being slow. Small accomplishments take on a greater significance than before. There are no big goals, just small victories, little steps that go unnoticed by everyone else.

  I do some local triathlons, plus I throw in an occasional big trip. No great challenges, but enough to keep me active and moving.

  Back home, my age group begins to thin out a little. Some guys get tired of the challenge of training, some pick up a bad knee or hip or back or a similar ailment. It’s a never-ending battle, the aches and pains of a vintage body.

  Still, a few rewards remain for those who muddle along. One of the advantages of getting old is that you garner great praise for insignificant achievements. It doesn’t take a lot to stand out in the crowd of seniors.

  A week before Thanksgiving, my ship comes in. I’ve hit the jackpot, I’ve won the lottery, I’m a made man.

  Not quite, but almost. Ken Glah, the owner of Endurance Sports Travel, calls to tell me that I’ve won an expense-paid trip to the upcoming 2008 IRONMAN® South Africa. I had registered several months back for the great giveaway that included airfare, hotel, and race entry fee. Ken’s daughter pulled my name out of the hat, somehow managing to avoid several thousand better qualified triathletes.

  I’m elated. All my life I’ve been entering contests and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything of value. I’ve been chasing something-for-nothing since the day I was born. Up until now, I’ve only been pursuing a dream; now I’m a winner.

  I’m excited to win this trip to South Africa. It’s not just the money. More important, this stroke of good luck validates my strange triathlon habit. When someone asks, “Why do you still do that exercise stuff at your age?” I reply, “Oh, haven’t you heard? I won a trip to the 2008 IRONMAN® South Africa, all expenses paid.” Here’s the best part: many of them think I won the trip based on a sterling athletic performance. They don’t know it’s the luck of the draw. Tiger Woods “won” a trip to the Masters and I “won” a trip to the 2008 IRONMAN South Africa. We’re both winners in my book.

  This is great timing. For the last few months I had been mulling over another IRONMAN trip, checking out the various travel possibilities. It’s good news at a good time. I’ve got about four months to go until race day.

  In preparation for South Africa, I do a quick and honest evaluation of my fitness and conditioning. Two years have passed since I last trained for an IRONMAN Triathlon. It’s a mixed bag, at best. My biking and running are slow, I’m way short of the miles I need, but it is a cold time of year, and I feel like I can put in the training to bring them up to a decent level.

  Swimming is a big problem. I haven’t spent much time in the pool, and it shows. I’m so slow that I feel there is a serious chance I might miss the two hour, twenty minute cutoff time. I’ll be swimming in the Indian Ocean and last year’s race had high winds and big waves. I need to be able to survive a bad day at sea.

  My mind conjures up a horrible scenario: I train all winter and tell everyone about the trip to South Africa, but then I miss the swim cutoff and must return home to spend the rest of my adult life explaining why I never even made it to the bike, much less the run.

  This whole swimming game is strange, it’s a fragile thing in the best of times. I’m sure I’ll know how to run and ride a bike until the day I die, but I can’t say the same for swimming. I feel like I’ve never owned my swim stroke outright; I’ve merely leased it and it’s under a constant threat of repossession. If I miss more than a few days in the pool, someone from the sheriff’s department with a gun on his hip will knock on my door with foreclosure papers, and I’ll be underwater in a big way.

  Fortunately, the fitness center where I swim has recruited a swimming instructor; this may be just the thing I need. I’ve never had any lessons, so my potential may be untapped. I could be a precious stone waiting to be polished and brought to perfection … or more accurately, a dying ember hoping to be coaxed back to life. In any case, maybe I can get a little better and make the swim cutoff time.

  Kasey is the lady who can unlock my hidden talents. She is tall and slim with a dark, exotic beauty, sort of like a young Penelope Cruz. She is just a few years out from swimming competitively in college, and her form in the pool is nearly perfect. I’ve never seen swimming look so effortless.

  Kasey watches me swim a few laps and is a little taken aback. This may be the biggest challenge she’s ever faced. She tells me that I’ve got a lot of strikes against me—bad form, bad habits, bad heart and lungs. (Kasey says all this in a nice way, but I can read between the lines. She’s looking for a way to send me to the arthritis pool.)

  I’m persistent, though. I tell her there’s practically no downside. She can’t lose, the only way I can go is up. Kasey is young, good-hearted, and she needs the money, so she signs
me up.

  These lessons are a new experience, and I find them interesting, nothing like I imagined they would be. I go once a week for an hour or so. Kasey is polite and encouraging. She says “do this” and I do it, she says “hold your arm this way, rotate like this, kick like that.” I’m like a sheep dog following his master’s commands. I respond to straightforward instruction, recognition, and praise. Kasey gives me detailed workouts for other days (in my mind I call these plans “recipes for success,” but I don’t say that out loud. I always try to appear mature and sophisticated in front of women).

  I follow these recipes religiously (Betty Crocker would be proud) for about six weeks, but absolutely nothing changes. My times remain slow, and I’m starting to lose faith. Maybe past a certain age swim lessons no longer work, maybe the ingredients in this recipe are too old. Then one day, about eight weeks or so along the way, the coaching kicks in and I get a lot faster (a lot is a relative term). There’s about a month until the race, so this works out well. I’m happy, and I can tell Kasey is glad to turn her attention to more promising clients.

  Bike training means that it’s once again time for those long Saturday morning rides. Since I’ve sworn off the indoor bike trainer, I spend a lot of time perched on my carbon fiber machine out in the cold. This is my first experience with cold weather riding, and it goes pretty well. Most days the temperature is in the thirties or forties, occasionally it drops into the twenties. I bundle up and enjoy the winter dawns. The trails are quiet and deserted, everyone else is at home in bed, meaning I can ride for hours in peace.

  Running remains a major chore. Stiff joints and weak muscles are my constant companions, but the workouts are much more tolerable in the cold than in the heat.

  Everyone says that the time spent training is more important than the speed or distance. I’m not sure I believe that, but I hope that it’s true.