Updates

I was a little optimistic about writing more. I apologize for the long absence and wanted to give an update on things.

To review – I was walking my dog, Titan, a husky/collie mix, on Feb. 13. I remember the date because we were gearing up for Valentine’s at the school and I was planning a quick trip to visit my folks since Monday was President’s Day and school was out. Titan and I had just started out on our walk when I saw another woman and her dog coming towards us.

Just a little background information. We have snow here in February, but the sidewalks were just clearing up (until the late February snowstorms covered them again) and spring was in the air around Valentine’s. For the first time since snow fell in November, I didn’t wear my snowshoes while walking Titan. Now while snow has melted off the sidewalks, there still are big berms of snow on the street by the sidewalks from snowplowing. These have been melting and freezing during our gradual warm up to Spring, so around each hill of snow is a puddle of frozen ice. And just so you know, Titan is a friendly dog, but very enthusiastic. His high energy coupled with his dark coloring and eyes can be a little scary for some people and dogs. A neighbor boy, hiding behind the legs of his mom, calls Titan the vampire dog. Well, he does have very white and very big canine teeth.

So we’re walking down the sidewalk and I see this other pair coming toward us. Titan sees them, too, and starts pulling on the leash. So I take him out onto the street to allow the others to walk by without an incident. It was perfect until the others hit the break between snow berms at the same time we could see through them and Titan took off for the dog. I was keeping up with him until we hit the puddle of ice and I face-planted. Because Titan is pulling me, it stretches me out when I fall (Yes, I have face-planted a few other times.) My shoulder took the brunt of the fall and then my cheekbone. My first priority was to get eyes on Titan, afraid of what was happening. When I could see him, he and the other dog were rubbing noses in the most friendly way.

It was just stupid of me to try to avoid something that wasn’t a problem. Hard lesson to learn.

I dislocated my shoulder, but good news was my rotator cuff muscle and labrum cartilage stayed in tack. I did have to have surgery, however, because a piece of bone broke off and was floating under the ball. My doctor tried to reattach it, but it crumbled, so instead he drilled into the ball of the shoulder to get the bone marrow to flow out and fill the divot. I had to wait three weeks after I fell because the doctor wanted to allow the shattered part of the ball to start healing and get “sticky.” That way chunks wouldn’t be knocked off by the scope.

The whole process and learning about the shoulder and how it works is just amazing to me. I also am very thankful to have two arms. This has made me very aware of how difficult it is to do, well, everything, one-handed, although I tease my co-workers that I am a one-handed wonder!

So for the next six weeks, I’m in a sling, one-handed, healing slowly. I’ll try to keep the blog updated and I’m about ready to get back to writing. Yep, I’m going a little bonkers by not writing. Our schools are out until April 3 due to the coronavirus pandemic. This week is spring break, so the outage is not as bad as it seems. Now that I can type on my laptop, keeping my elbow tucked tightly to my side, I hope to get some writing goals made and accomplished during the break.

I hope spring is breaking out where you are!

Enjoy the read,

TC Robinson