Patience is a necessity

Personal

On Tuesday of next it’ll have been three months since my accident. It’s so weird to see the progress I’ve made, which is a lot, but that I still have a lot more to go through in the upcoming months. Thanks so much to everyone that left comments, it meant a lot to me!

Today I had my 30 day follow-up with my orthopedic doctor to get my wrist cast off and to check on my hip and tibial plateau. The good news is that my cast came off, and I had a little more mobility than he expected. The bad news? Looking over the xray for my wrist he noticed that I have about a 4.5mm gap by one of my carpels. He said this is because I have some sort of torn or damaged tendon. Either way, there’s a high chance I’ll be referred to a hand surgeon to have it repaired or reconstructed in the next few weeks. This is all pending though since I go in next week for an MRI on the wrist. I’m hoping it’s not too bad but seeing as though it’s been 3 months, surgery seems likely.

My knee is doing perfect as far as healing goes. The only noticeable thing is some calcification forming over one of the pins, but it won’t affect any mobility as it’s on the inner side of my leg. The biggest disappoint during my appointment was my hip’s poor recovery. It’s been 11 weeks post-op, and the piece of broken femur that’s re-attached with three pins is still not fusing with my original femur. As such, I have to wait another 30 days for my next checkup, and still cannot do any physical therapy to start walking again. I’m also stuck wearing my hip brace for a long time, as he mentioned he’ll have me wearing this while I’m going through PT.

The only real good news was that he was comfortable enough to allow me to increase the weight-bearing status of my right leg. I can put up to 30lbs of weight (or pressure) on the leg. So while it wasn’t what I wanted, it’s still something I can deal with. I was really just hoping to be able to start PT this month, so by October 6th (my best friend Amy’s birthday) and October 11th (Steve‘s birhday) I’d be able to go out and have some fun to celebrate their birthdays. But alas, my extreme dance moves will have to be put on hold for awhile!

Other than that I’ve been quite busy with my hosting company, and two other side projects of mine. My goal right now though is to start getting back into freelancing full-time as my cast is now off. Reason being is not only has my money dwindled quickly (insurance, bills, yadda yadda) but all of my bills from being in the hospital have been coming in like crazy. I do have health insurance now which thankfully covers almost 90%. I still have a lot of bills to be processed but my biggest one ($235,000) is actually being processed right now so this is my main bill I’m worried about.

Well, this post is long enough so I’m calling it quits! 😛

My Road To Recovery

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This post is long overdue, but I’m finally putting aside some time to write this. On July 9th I was finally released from the hospital after 32 days. 32 days that I can never get back, but 32 days I’ll never regret.

I don’t remember my accident at all. However, for clarification, my use of the term “accident” implies the impact of Robert Slager’s (of Slager and Son Masonry) truck against my car and the time from impact until I was conscious moments later after a grateful bystander came to my side to keep me calm and whom also called 911. I remember 10 minutes beforehand where I had been at a stop sign answering a call from my sister Morgan. I told her I was on my way home and that I’d talk to her in 10 minutes or so since I wasn’t too far away. Next thing I know I’m waking up and hearing a man’s voice praying to the Lord for him to look over me. Then a huge wave of pain spread throughout my body. I couldn’t open my eyes, but my “guardian angel” noticed I was conscious and asked for my name, then phone numbers for my parents. He told my I had been in a bad accident and that the paramedics were on their way.

Everything else was a blur that night. From the time I was removed from my car to getting to the ER, it felt like 15 minutes had gone by. In actuality it took 1 hour to extract me from my car, and another 15 minutes to drive to the hospital. I had been in so much pain that I was in and out of consciousness. After a short time in the ER, I was finally able to open my eyes and at that point just kept asking for my parents. I then remember the nurses telling me they were going to cut my clothes off, and I said the least expected thing. I told the nurse she couldn’t cut off my tops because they were my favorite t-shirt and undershirt. It’s a bit of a blur trying to remember everything that night. I finally got to see my parents, my sister Morgan, and Steve. My best friend Amy wasn’t there yet, but she came while I was in surgery.

Forewarning: the rest of this post is unbelievably long. Continue reading “My Road To Recovery” →

Broken bones and a totaled car

Personal

On June 8th around 9:40pm on my way home I was in a car accident. I was turning left when I was tboned by a truck being driven by Robert Slager (Slager and Son Masonry) going 55mph.

I’d go into so much more detail but I’m typing this from my iPhone right now.

I suffered a fractured left wrist, a fractured left foot, a severely fractured right tibula and knee, and a displaced and fractured hip ball. The right side of my face had deep lacerations.

I’ve been in the hospital since the accident. Have had three surgeries for my hip so far with one of those fixing my wrist and foot fractures, and stitching my face.

In an hour and a half I’m going into my fourth surgery to fix my fractured hip. I’d write more but my tummy hurts and I’m thirsty (but I can’t eat or drink before this surgery).

So until then.. Wish me luck.

Playing catch up

Personal

I’ve yet again managed to allow my website to plummet off the deep end. I let it go for a few good reasons though. I had been extremely busy with Holdfire, and ended up focusing most of my energy towards it to get things accomplished. As usual it took me a little longer than anticipated, but regardless I got it done.

8187415 The past few months have been pretty decent. My previous relationship ended, only to have someone else come back into my life again (on my accord.) May 8th I celebrated my 23rd birthday with my best friend Amy, Steve, and another good friend, Davia. Although the best part was receiving a text from Steve telling me I had a delivery. So I went to my front door only to open it and see a package from ProFlowers. I opened it up and it was a gorgeous bouqet of 24 roses that were yellow, pale orange, pale pink and red. This alone was probably the only thing I needed to enjoy the rest of my birthday. We ended up going to Houlihans for dinner, and then to Durbins for drinks and good times.

Steve and I went to a park for a picnic on Monday after dropping off his Macbook Pro at the Apple store to get fixed. It was a gorgeous day out, and what made it better was that he ended up asking me to be his girlfriend. One thing I have to admit is that I have honestly never had a guy ask me out to his face. Majority of the time it was maybe through the internet, or a text message but nothing as great as this. Things have only gotten better since then. He’s the first boyfriend in my life to have actually taken the time out to hang out with my friends, and receive the seal of approval from the one person who mean everything to me, my best friend Amy. My mom and dad love him, and he’s gotten along quite well with my siblings.

Aside from that we’ve been up to so much. We went and saw Star Trek last weekend, and went to the Angels & Demons 12:01am showing on Friday. Last night we went out with my friends and his brother and friends to a local bar and had an absolute blast. I believe Friday we’re going to the 12:01am for Terminator Salvation so that’ll be flipping sweet.

So, how’s that for actually updating my website and actually writing about something personal rather than some bullshit iPhone jailbreaking, or what software alternatives I’ve come across. I’m definitely going to try to update this more… That and I’m actually working on getting this site fixed up and active again.

Trying new things out

Personal

For years I’ve stuck to the same software. Firefox for a browser, Thunderbird for email, iTunes for music, and Quicktime for movies. Recently I’ve gotten pretty tired of Thunderbird for it’s lack of other in-depth features. Then I ended up stumbling upon Postbox (Mac and PC). It’s built off of Thunderbird, but definitely has more bang for it. The biggest thing I liked was that when you loaded up an email in the bottom pane, it would have a sidebar of any media or links included in it that you can access right away without having to skim through the email to find. There’s a lot more features, but you know, I’m just a tad too lazy to blog about it.

After that I decided I wanted to try to find other replacements for some of my software. I’ve replaced iTunes with Songbird (Windows XP or Vista), although the main factor being that iTunes was not too fond of Vista 64bit. My favorite part is that it’s built around Firefox so I can download other add-ons to enhance my experience. It’s linked to my last.fm account (which is integrated already), and I’ve got a few others like coverflow, showing last.fm data about the artist playing, and a few others for skinning. It has no CD ripping or burning features yet, although that’s on their to-do list. That was another problem with 64bit and iTunes, the CD rip/burn was inoperable. 😐

My HD capture card came with proprietary encoding software from Arcsoft which was really lacking in any major functionality. The biggest problem was that encoding took longer than it should have. Armando, ended up finding an awesome free alternative to it, Super ©. It’s perfect because I needed to be able to encode to MOV with H264 video and AAC audio, and be able to chose the resolutions for it and fine tune a few other specs. Encoding is also about 75% quicker than what I experienced with Arcsoft’s prepacked bologna.

Majority of my interest in trying out new software has mainly developed after I joined Wakoopa.com. It tracks the software (and webapps) that you use, and charts them for you. They do have up a recommended section for you and while it’s in beta, it hasn’t given me some decent choices. Majority of those were based on popularity and I was already aware of, so from just randomly browsing other users’ profiles I was able to find some other software to look at.

Other than the few I’ve changed over I still haven’t (or won’t) find alternatives to my main programs like Photoshop, After Effects, Intype (well technically this replaced Notepad++), and Firefox. 😛