It’s official—my collarbone is broken. (Reminder why.)
And wow, the pain has been incredible. Not the pain from the injury which was pretty mild on my scale. I’m talking about the pain of figuring out what terrible options for "health" "care" might be open to me. Wow. Three weeks after the impact, I finally was able to unravel my insurance situation enough to go get the souvenir x-ray shown here. Ironically, I was able to just hand them wads of green money because at the several hundred dollar level, there is no insurance to speak of. Could be a lot worse. I got off lightly and consider myself very lucky.
The inset photo was taken 6 days after impact. I was pretty impressed with the intense biliverdin color scheme. At first I wasn’t sure that anything was broken, but as the swelling went down there were times when I could subtly feel exactly what the x-ray shows. I knew that it still would probably work out fine but I wanted to get an idea of how delicate of a situation I was in. The bone mechanic told me what I suspected and hoped which was that it should heal naturally if given half a chance. The most annoying thing besides dealing with insurance web sites is that I still can’t get back on the bike. I’m plenty strong enough to ride but at this point in my recovery, any tiny little mishap is likely to be magnified into an orthopedic engineering project costing more than a spacecraft.