Wounded, on the job, far from Canada

Sometime in early December, 2023

If I didn’t mention it, you wouldn’t be privy to the slow typing and the banging of the cast against my laptop. You also wouldn’t know about my constantly tapping the wrong keys on the keyboard and needing to go back every few words and correct my mistakes. You wouldn’t be aware of my need to stop every ten minutes or so because keyboarding with a new cast on is stressful on my lower arm. Persisting through the discomfort results in stress for the entire arm. These things are regular occurrences for me now, as I sloppily navigate my laptop, with my three-week-old broken wrist. Until the last few days, I wasn’t able to do much at all, on the computer or off it.

I’ve only had one very minor workplace injury before. That fingertip laceration was easily repaired by a short trip to the local hospital’s emergency department and some light bandaging. I’ve never broken a bone, even in many years of playing baseball and in about a thousand karate classes, including during some aggressive sparring.

I’ve had childhood scrapes and bruises, but less than most boys my age. I’ve had a few good bruises from being hit by baseballs on various parts of my body. I’ve jammed toes and fingers from working out on the heavy bag. I’ve had severe bursitis in my shoulder, brought on by trying to be cool on the monkey bars in the water park as a 45-year-old. I’ve also had moderate knee discomfort from many hours of driving the truck non-stop. Physiotherapy and well-placed stretching helped overcome that.

Still, no broken bones.

It’s taken a freak situation for me to finally get my first one at the ripe age of 56. It happened on the job and out of the country, more than a full day’s drive away from home. It happened suddenly, in the early morning hours that I hate so much.

H is for How and Hastily it Happened

It never occurred to me to consider whether or not loading docks have outdoor lighting. It occurs to me now. This business in Statesville, North Carolina evidently didn’t have any lights in their yard. At least none that they bothered to turn on. Not even a few small motion-detecting lights.

This lack of lighting wouldn’t have been a problem had they stuck to their word. I already knew that they were doing inventory the next morning and were prepared to load me only if I arrived early enough. In appreciation of this tight schedule, I called the previous afternoon and asked if I could stay overnight on the property and load in the morning. They said yes and even told me which dock to back my truck into.

They said I would be loaded at 7:30am, and I readily agreed. The plan was to pick up that load, then pick up another load in Statesville, then head north. It was American Thanksgiving week so, for once, there would be no picking up freight in the Pittsburgh area to fill up the remainder of the trailer before returning home.

I wanted to work out that night. I’m adamant about exercising while on the road, to remain as strong and healthy as possible. But I was just too tired. Had I known a physical ailment was about to befall me, I probably would have pushed myself to do it. But no one knows when freakish events might happen. So, at a rather early hour for me, round about 10:30pm, I fell into a decent sleep like I usually do in the truck.

I was wakened suddenly at 6:15 by the sound of movement in the trailer. In my half-awake state, my immediate thought was ‘What the fuck? They said 7:30.’

I pulled myself out of the sleeper bunk, yanked on my pants and slipped on my Crocs, and rushed to the back of the trailer on the driver’s side. I didn’t see anyone there so I went around to the other side. Through the small crack between the open trailer doors and the dock, I saw a guy lowering the dock plate, preparing to load my trailer. I told him about the 7:30 scheduled time and he said that they were there already so they figured they’d start loading me.

The previous freight I loaded was air filters and they were light. They could be easily crushed by poorly loaded heavy freight. I didn’t want that to happen. I told the guy I had to come inside to set up my trailer before he stated loading. He said that’s fine and pointed to the door a few steps away to my left.

Despite my half-awake state, despite the complete darkness of night, and despite a total absence of outdoor lighting in the dock area, I could still detect a tall greenish metal container that was affixed to the building. But I couldn’t detect the foot high pile of steel (sheets I think) stacked right next to it, directly between me and the door. My foot hit the base of the pile, I tripped onto it, and that was that.

Not Alright, Not Even Close

I hadn’t felt anything like this in years. Not since I was 23. In the summer of 1990, I was working for a landscaping company. Early one morning we were mowing a lawn in the town of Dundas. I was pushing the mower in the backyard and was operating on sloping ground. The mower got away from me and I pulled it back. In doing so, I ran over the tip of my left big toe. I called for my boss, unaware of the strain in my voice. He came running, knowing instinctively that something was wrong. Soon I was in McMaster Hospital getting a partial amputation of my big toe. That’s quite another story. But it’s funny to vividly recall minute details of an accident, even 33 years later.

Now, lying on steel and in agony, my mind rocketed to the unknown and the future. Never mind what this day and the rest of this week would bring. I was worried what this incident might mean for me in the long run, regarding my ability to work and earn money. I became suddenly and acutely aware of long-term implications.

The guy leaned outside the crack in the dock door and asked if I was alright. I abruptly answered ‘no.’ I’m sure it was an anguished ‘no.’

I was definitely in some state of shock, yet somehow was quickly mobile, aware and functioning. I knew I was hurt seriously, though not horribly. At very least my wrist was badly sprained, though I had no idea yet to what extent. I picked myself up from the steel pile and felt a few other parts of my body in some degree of pain. I lifted my left pant leg and saw that my shin was slightly bloodied. My right knee felt a bit sore too and my right shin showed a spot of blood. Yet I knew absolutely that my wrist had taken the brunt of the blow.

What to do next? When you consider an ideal situation here, you might envision someone ushering me into a clean office, directing me to sit and asking me questions to determine the nature of my injury and what they might do to assuage my pain – in other words, ensuring I was well taken care of. Nope. Didn’t happen. Was the company to blame for not being compassionate and helpful? Did I give them the impression that I wasn’t seriously hurt? Did they not have the personnel there to handle such a situation? I’m still mulling these things over.

Moot points, moot points.

Into the Building, Unwavering

Somehow, some way, I got up and made my way into the building, with less wherewithal than I’d ever recommend doing anything. My prevailing idea was to help the guy start to load my trailer. More specifically, I wanted to prevent him from making a mistake that I would later have to correct. Yup, I still had my mind on the job and making sure he didn’t mess up the loading and cost me time.

Of course, I couldn’t stop wincing in pain. I stopped every few seconds as another twinge hit me, sometimes making me hunch over to collect myself. Yet I managed to remove a load bar from the hanging rack with my left arm, doing my best to protect my right arm from bumping against anything. I started to carry it toward the front of my trailer. I only made it a few steps before telling the guy he was on his own. I gave a few instructions then left the trailer.

As he moved about, I asked for a bag of ice. He said he didn’t know if one was available. He didn’t seem overly concerned about me and I didn’t understand why not, given my plainly and obviously expressed anguish. I said I really needed ice and he eventually went to check if any was available. He came back a few minutes later with a zip lock bag of said ice, before resuming his work with no apparent empathy.

He didn’t offer me any place decent to sit so I had to find something less than suitable. I plopped myself down on a sturdy pallet that was near the trailer door. It was very uncomfortable trying to balance on that pallet, sitting on an awkward angle and icing my forearm while dealing with the increasing pain. The melting ice soon started dripping onto my left pant leg. I was resting my right elbow on my right leg and holding my upper arm above my left leg.

A Most Unique Bathroom Visit

My bladder soon reminded me that I hadn’t yet peed – my ritualistic morning pee; the very first thing I do every morning unless I’m rushed or distracted. I asked the guy where the bathroom was and he said at the back of the building. Great, yet another warehouse without a dedicated bathroom for drivers located by the loading dock! I made my way to the back, wondering how I was going to manage to get this done. Fortunately, I had on loose-fitting pull-up pants, the kind of comfortable pants you’d wear around the house on a lazy day, or post-workout. I was hurried earlier when I pulled them on in the truck and hadn’t yet tied the drawstring. Good thing because a tied drawstring isn’t what I needed now.

Upon finishing at the urinal, with relative ease, I went to the sink to have a better look at my wrist and legs. I hadn’t examined the wrist closely yet. I didn’t want to take the ice off. Maybe, I was also afraid of what I might see. Not the severity of the injury, because I don’t get grossed out easily. But, the implications. How would I complete my trip and head out on another? That’s a trucker’s life: finish one run, take a couple of days or weekend off then head out on another run.

I screwed up some courage. My wrist had swelled a lot and looked abnormal, though far from grotesque. It was puffy. I didn’t know any more than that. I lifted one pant leg then another. There was visible blood caking on my left shin. I wet my left hand with water from the automatic tap. I played an awkward game of raising my left leg, keeping my pant leg lifted above my knee, dabbing my shin with my damp left hand, putting my leg back on the ground with the pant leg dropping back down as I did so, pulling out a couple of paper towels from the dispenser, drawing my pant leg back toward my knee and patting my leg with the paper towels until most obvious initial blood was removed. It didn’t hurt, or maybe it just didn’t hurt nearly as much as my wrist hurt.

I hadn’t yet realized the much lesser physical effects of my fall, which would present themselves in varying degrees in the ensuing hours, days and weeks. My right knee was bruised, to the extent that a month later I still wouldn’t be kneeling on the ground without discomfort. Fortunately, and somehow, there was no apparent structural damage to the knee. I never got it checked out but that’s my ‘bad’ knee – the one that’s less prone to aching and stiffening – and I’m sure I would have felt any significant damage. My right thumb would soon show a blood blister and blood buildup under the nail. My body as a whole felt stiffer than usual but I think that’s some sort of impact or trauma response. Plus, I wasn’t properly stretched out as usual because I didn’t do my regular workout the night before.

There’s irony here, of course. I rushed to get here before dark, to scope out the long driveway, the turns around to the back and the dock area. The idea was to see all of it with some semblance of daylight, to take note of any obstructions. Such is my nature when I’m trucking. I absolutely hate taking chances of any kind. Typically, I go to considerable lengths to avoid problems. I’d go so far as to carefully turn around my rig upon a sign of trouble (i.e. truck won’t fit easily into the mouth of a company’s driveway) and head somewhere else to park for the night. In this case, I was minutes from both the eastbound and the westbound rest areas on I-40 in Claremont.

More Ice, Mercifully

When I returned slowly back to the dock area, I resumed my spot on the pallet. A lady from the office soon came to see me and asked me what happened. I gave her the basic details and requested more ice, as the initial substandard bagful had mostly melted and leaked its contents onto my wrist, pants and the floor. She brought a second, better, bag pretty quickly. It would last long enough to assuage some still forthcoming pain and swelling, that would come over the next hour or so.

The freight loading was done by this point and the dock guy pointed to the paperwork, which he had placed on a nearby pallet. It’s (another) moot point but I’m constantly frustrated by loading areas that don’t have a proper shop desk: a suitable place to lay out and sign paperwork. So, here I was bending over and trying to hold the paperwork in place with my mostly useless right lower arm, whose pain level hadn’t stopped elevating.

At least I had a replenished source of ice.

Typically, at any customer, when the loading or unloading is finished and the requisite paperwork is signed, you simply return to your truck and prepare to leave. In this case, however, the unknowns ruled the moment and would govern every action in the immediate future.

I’d never stepped up and into my truck more painstakingly. The primary rule about climbing safely into a truck cab hit me then: always maintain three points of contact, either two hands and one foot or two feet and one hand. The latter it was!

At some point in all this, I started taking Extra Strength Tylenol. I was sure glad to have it with me. It wasn’t long before it started easing the worst of the pain. I’d continue taking it throughout the remainer of the day, every time I felt even a minor twinge creeping up.

I don’t recall when I called my wife, to break the news. Surely, I called her before I called anyone else. I typically talk to her a few times every day when I’m on the road so this was one call that wouldn’t seem out of place. She was shocked, as I’d driven a truck nearly seven years with hardly any more than a strained muscle. She was supportive, naturally, but she surely was also wondering what the immediate future might bring for me. Pain, essentially, followed by a lot of questions.

The Obligatory Phone Call

One thing was clear. Actually, maybe only one thing was clear. I had to call my company, specifically our safety director. It was still before eight o’clock, when the office crew typically arrives. I couldn’t wait any longer to break the news. I called the safety director on his cell phone, figuring he was on his way to work. He was. I told him what happened and naturally he was concerned for me.

I knew a lot of the onus was suddenly on him as well, and it wasn’t simply a matter of me being stuck a thousand kilometres from home. Very quickly, there would be logistical matters to worry about: a series of actions that would be necessary to advance the situation. They would roll out somewhat as follows: get me to the hospital, then get me back to this location, then determine which company driver was nearby and could come pick me up and take me and my stuff home. Meanwhile, resolve what would be done with my truck and who might be dispatched to come down from Canada trailer-less to retrieve it and haul it back home. Plus, the discussions had to begin with the bosses about how my upcoming weeks would be handled: how long I’d be off (unknown), my pay, my worker’s compensation (WSIB) claim, and possibly a handful of other unknown elements.

How was I to know about any of it? I’d never been through a trucking injury process before.

First things first, we quickly determined that there was no way I could drive home. I didn’t yet know whether or not my wrist was actually broken. Yet I knew for certain, judging purely by the level of pain and low level of functioning, that my wrist was useless. You definitely need a working right wrist to operate a transport truck, because of all the pulling, pushing, lifting, lowering, torquing and ratcheting. So that option was right off the table.

My safety director told me to call 911 and explain the nature of my injury. Believe it or not, it was my first ever call to 911 for a personal matter. The only other calls were a couple for trucks I spotted in a ditch in the snow. My safety director said the operator would dispatch a paramedic crew and that’s exactly what happened. I would call them soon and when I did, they arrived in less than 15 minutes.

But first a couple of other things occurred.

What More Could They Possibly Want from Me?

As I was sitting in the driver’s seat, somewhat comfortably considering my previous two sit-downs inside the building and the ongoing pain – blah, blah, blah – I continued to ice my wound and contemplate how my next few hours, days and weeks might unfold. Shortly, three people came to my truck door. The dock guy and the office lady were accompanied by a guy I hadn’t yet met. I pressed the button to lower the window. The new guy said he heard about what happened and wanted me to sign papers acknowledging the event. I was in semi-disbelief but was obviously still in some sort of state of shock, maybe the type of shock which might make you do anything to get people to stop bothering you. My nature to comply took over even as I stressed that it was hard for me to sign anything. With the three of them standing there, I took one paper after another and scrawled my signature with a badly shaking hand, as the guy explained to me what I was signing. Fortunately, I had enough of my faculties to ask if I was merely acknowledging events and nothing more. I asked if these papers were legally binding and he said no. As I continued to sign, I felt myself getting more pissed that they were wanting me to do this, right here and now, seemingly with little to no regard for my comfort or welfare.

Business is business, right? And of course, insurance is insurance. And accepting blame is a game no one wants to play.

On top of that, once I was finished signing the papers, they asked if it was possible for me to move the truck, just a short way away, because another customer might be coming and would need to use the dock. I said it would be difficult and I didn’t even know if it as possible, but I’d try as soon as it was physically possible. Again, I just wanted to get things to the point where people would stop bothering me and simply start helping me and I could just sit there and let them.

I managed to do it, very slowly and carefully. I knew I had to, certainly before calling the paramedics and having them cart me off for hours. I reached my left hand across my body to clumsily push in the tractor and trailer brake airline valves. Then I drove as slowly as I’d ever driven a vehicle, pulling forward about forty feet then gliding it left-ward until it was relatively flush with the curb, making sure to stop well before the oncoming severe slope that leads out of the property and onto the road.

There I parked and there the truck would stay until after the American Thanksgiving Day weekend. Parked there, it wouldn’t be in the way until the following Monday morning. By then, the plan was that a company driver would pick it up and bring it back home.

Oh, but one more thing for me to do. Yes, it never ends. They said I had to place a safety bolt on the closed trailer doors, to satisfy management. Obviously, their freight was the last freight loaded and thus the easiest to steal, in theory.

Thank God they helped me close the trailer doors and snap the two plastic bolt pieces together through the proper hole in the right door latch.

All Done with the Hardest Part, Right?

Well, yes, my dealings with this company had come to an unsatisfying end. But as I was considering a hospital trip, I had to gather a few belongings. My wife would either moan or laugh at this, because I’m telling you in all seriousness that the first thing I thought of is my stomach. What if they didn’t have food at the hospital? I mean, what if they didn’t have any in the Emergency Department that they could, and would, immediately dispense to me upon request. Just because my wrist was broken, probably, doesn’t mean my stomach was under any duress or would simply stop signaling ‘lunchtime’ in its usual way. No farting, just rumbling, and gut discomfort.

With my left hand and arm, already seemingly acclimatized to doing everything without aid, I pulled down my durable blue UnderArmour duffel bag from the shelf above the closet and dropped it onto my bunk. I checked my fridge and quickly pulled out a pre-prepared chicken wrap, a protein bar and a chocolate bar. I place them all in the bag and added my personal hygiene bag, my cross-body sling bag (containing keys, wallet, passport, etc.), and a couple of light clothing items just in case. I figured that ‘d be likely to sweat, given the pain, stress, anxiety and as-yet unknown temperature inside the hospital.

Calling 911

The paramedics were there in about 10 minutes. I had told the 9-1-1 operator that there was no big hurry, then regretted saying it. No matter. There were three of them. One slipped my arm into a makeshift sling and said to take a seat inside the van. They took my blood pressure while we discussed what happened. Of course, it was up significantly. Which makes me think ‘why do they always take your blood pressure at times like this? Are they really expecting that it might not be high?’

The short and uneventful ride to the hospital was notable to me if only because this was the first time I’d travelled these streets in anything but a transport truck. I somehow remained cheerful and upbeat throughout the ride. I tried to inject as much humour as possible into our conversation. Maybe I was thrilled that the worst of the ordeal was over. I mean, what could happen now that’s worse than what already happened?

Looking back, I think I was still slightly in shock. Plus, my adventurous spirit was taking over. I didn’t know anything about what might happen in the next few hours so my mindset was literally, ‘Well, let’s see where this day takes me.’ It would be like a roller coaster minus the feeling that I might throw up or die catastrophically at any second.

Iredell Memorial Hospital

Upon first hearing the pronunciation of the hospital, I realized that I’d been saying ‘Iredell’ wrong in my head for years, whenever I passed through this area and saw the name on a sign. It’s Eye-er-dell, not Ear-e-dell. Anyway, it’s the name of the county in which Statesville is directly in the middle. For Canadian truck drivers’ this small city is notable because it’s the last significant hub on the northbound on I-77 before the Virginia border.

I can summarize my few hours at the hospital much better than I could possibly summarize the incident itself. Nothing momentous would happen now. It was a matter of ‘we need to do this, then that, then the other thing.’ Structured stuff. The hospital staff had done this thousands of times.

First came the check-in. I vaguely recall turning down a wheelchair ride into the hospital. I don’t actually remember if that really happened. Anyway, I walked in to the Emergency Department unaided. I could have used assistance before; not now.

One of the guys at the counter couldn’t pronounce my last name, for some bizarre reason. The on-duty doctor – the guy who would fix me up shortly – made fun of him for it, saying it’s a very common name. I mentioned it’s the same last name as Mike Schmidt, the Hall of Fame third baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies. That got no response. Obviously, no baseball fans here. I was trying to be charming somehow, and would continue to try, with mostly pleasant response throughout my stay.

This plan to remain calm and pleasant had a very brief blip when the doctor asked me if I was glad to be in the U.S. now. I asked what he meant. He referred to wait times in U.S. hospitals being shorter than wait times in Canadian hospitals. I sloughed off his comment by saying something like ‘Hmm, I’ve never had much of a problem, and I’ve had my share of hospital visits.’ This was the truth, for me and members of my family on numerous occasions. Sure, I’d heard about many Canadians having horrible experiences with massive wait times at hospitals across the country. Similarly, yet much differently, I’d heard endless accounts of Americans being turned away from their hospitals and medical clinics because they didn’t have the means to pay. Apples vs. oranges, right?

Room Two

A seemingly endless string of questions soon started and went on intermittently for about 90 minutes. The questions came at me from different hospital personnel, here at the desk and more so in Room Two, where I was led and instructed to lie down and get comfortable.

Meanwhile, a nurse adjusted my hospital bed for length, elevated the head section for my long neck and gave me a temporary open splint on which I rested my forearm and wrist, on top of my right leg.

I don’t recall the roles of everyone who plied me for information. They were all nice enough. Or maybe I was the nice one. Anyway, each came with either an iPad or paperwork. I was asked my company’s name, our insurance provider (whose name I didn’t recall), what happened, where it happened, my family doctor’s name, my address, my phone number, and so on… the minutiae.

Naturally they needed sufficient information to get reimbursed for my out-of-country medical treatment. I knew enough from TV about the US healthcare system to understand that payment is a big part of their operations. Not that it isn’t in Canada. But here we just hand in our provincial health card and presto, not so many questions.

I told them that whatever information they couldn’t get from me, thy could easily obtain from my safety director. I knew he’d get a call. He was already having a busy day, partly because of me, so what’s one more call?

When the doctor came in, before he even checked my wrist I joked that for years I suspected I have a high pain tolerance. He said I definitely do because I walked in unaided and not wincing in pain. I said I thought that was common for a simple broken wrist but he assured me no. Cool!

As he began to look at my wrist, I said I wondered if it was actually broken. I mean, maybe it was just sprained very badly. Possible, right? Like I said, I’ve never had a severe arm injury. So, what did I know? He hadn’t even looked at it for ten seconds before saying “it’s broken.” I said, “Oh really?” He said if it wasn’t broken, it wouldn’t look like that. Puffy and misshapen, I presumed. He proceeded to show me the places on my wrist that confirmed the bad break.

He left and said he’d be back soon to do the repair. Meanwhile, I started to wear a path between Room Two and the bathroom, down the hall and around the corner. I have to pee often enough as it is and it’s worse when I’m stressed. I wonder if the desk staff thought I might also have a bladder issue. I do. I drink a lot of liquid and then out it comes. So, not medically worrisome; just inconvenient for me.

In the next while, there were more questions. Also, I took several selfies of my wrist from several angles and contemplated a Facebook post that would explain this day. Then I ate my lunch and was glad I brought it. Incidentally, I’ve never not been glad to have brought food with me, anywhere I’ve gone.

Additionally, I had a nice extended conversation with a nurse who seemed sweet and forlorn. We talked twice, including later outside the hospital as I was waiting for my Uber. She told me, in apparent confidentiality, that she and her husband were relocating to the Chicago area. They didn’t want to live too close to the big city and I said that was a good idea. I said living so close to Toronto is often a huge pain in the ass. She mentioned Valparaiso, Indiana as a possible landing spot. I Iooked it up on Google Maps and suggested South Bend, just an hour away from Chicago and well known for being home to Notre Dame University. I had no idea if South Bend is a cool place to live but I’m drawn to areas with colleges and universities.

The Crack and Fix

I knew right from the outset that we were leading up to the apex of my visit. The doctor said it wouldn’t hurt as much as I might imagine once I had the local anesthetic. I thought about asking for a rag to bite down on, then considered that I was a relatively impervious to pain and may not need it. I recanted and asked for one. The doctor said it probably wasn’t necessary but gave me one anyway. He carefully pushed the long needle into my forearm to numb the area and slowly pulled it out. He my felt forearm for the precise location of the break. Then he did as he had explained to me: he gently but firmly cracked several of my fractured wrist bones back into place. I heard each crack too but they didn’t bother me much. I’m a forty-year veteran of chiropractic treatments so hearing my bones crack is second nature, a clear sign of recovery. The fix was really as simple and straightforward as that and it happened in a surprisingly short period of time. I lost count of how many bones he moved; I didn’t really care about a specific number. I only cared that he got them all.

Are you still with me? Grossed out yet?

Soon the doctor had placed my forearm in a long metal splint with cushioning inside. Then he used a lot of tensor bandaging to wrap my arm, starting at my knuckles and all the way up over my elbow. He said the idea was to achieve maximum stability until I got home for follow up treatment. I was worried about not being able to use my elbow and upper arm, which of course weren’t injured. But who was I to argue with someone who had done this procedure a nearly infinite number of times? So, I complied.

Soon it was time to leave Room Two and head over to the area where they review your paperwork before you get checked out. I didn’t put much mental effort into understanding this step. I just did what they asked, showing them whatever form they wanted to see that was given to me in Room Two. I also answered more questions. Surely all this probing had much to do with my being Canadian and their desire to guarantee payment.

Well, that might be cynical. Obviously, paperwork matters a lot when you’re sharing medical information. In this case, for my troubles of the day I was given a discharge folder containing all sorts of information for follow-up treatment back home. Among the paperwork inside was a paper copy and a CD of my x-ray and many pages of discharge instructions. Most of the instructions were abundantly obvious, such as ‘Keep the splint dry and clean’ and especially ‘Do not use the injured arm to support your body weight until your health care provider says that you can.’ Ya, like that was even a possibility. I also got several pages about antibiotics and when you should and shouldn’t use them. I honestly didn’t see those pages until I was researching for this article. I had no idea, and still don’t, if antibiotics would have been the least bit helpful in treating my injury.

The paperwork clearly identified the injury I sustained: a distal radius fracture. Never heard of it before and will hopefully never have to deal with one again.

One last thing before I left: the doctor had asked earlier if I wanted a prescription for a strong painkiller. I had said no but then changed my mind. I thought, I’d better have them for the long drive home, because you never know. I returned to the check-in area and waited for him. He soon ordered for it to be sent to the nearby Walgreens, where I was told it would be waiting for me shortly.

I was escorted out the door. I told the nurse that I didn’t need anyone to accompany me but she sloughed it off as hospital procedure. I’m not one to fight reasonable rules.

Outside, I had the second part of the conversation with that nurse who may be relocating north. She was walking by and stopped to talk. I wished her all the best and then it was just me waiting for the Uber that my safety director had ordered for me.

A Very Different Ride Home

As if my day wasn’t bizarre and disjointed enough, when the Uber driver dropped me off at the pharmacy counter at the back of the Walgreens, I waited for about ten minutes before anyone addressed me. Then some young lady with plenty of tattoos and piercings asked for my prescription. I said the hospital had called it in. She looked it up and said she had no record of it and it likely hadn’t come through yet. She said I could wait. I figured that meant indefinitely so I said no, with some irritation, and turned around and left.

No big loss. I was prescribed Oxycodone, which I had absolutely no interest in taking. Actually, I was pretty scared about taking it. I vowed years ago never to go anywhere near opioids as long as I could avoid them. I’ve never been addicted to anything in my life – except maybe chocolate (joke) – and I’m not interested in inviting addiction into my life now. So extra strength Tylenol would have to do, come radiating pain or far worse. Now I just had to hope that I’d be relatively pain-free until I got home, and wouldn’t need an unscheduled visit to a pharmacy somewhere in the wiles of West Virginia.

The Uber driver rolled into the parking lot just behind the trucker who was going to take me home. The trucker made a joke about my bad luck and I laughed. I packed up as many of my belongings as I could and handed them one by one out the truck door to this other driver. We placed my clothes, remaining food and electronics in the truck and the rest of my stuff in the trailer. He wrapped a strap around my things to make sure they wouldn’t shift in the trailer while we made our way back through the upper part of North Carolina and into Virginia and West Virginia.

The poor guy hadn’t had a chance to shower yet, partly because he had to come get me. I was feeling a bit musty myself. We stopped at the Flying J truck stop in Wytheville, Virginia to get a shower each. I’d been there many times before, as has every last trucker that travels this area on a weekly basis. But I’d never been there with a giant wrap on my arm. I’d been cautioned in the hospital to keep it dry. I asked the gentleman who cleans the showers if he had something I could use to cover my arm and he handed me a giant clear garbage bag. Perfect!

I showered far more easily than I could have imagined, though I was now using only one arm to do all the work, including squeezing soap and shampoo out of their respective plastic containers. I carefully raised one leg and let each pour out until there was a sufficient amount. Then I use my left hand to do the scalp massaging, body wash spreading, rinse assisting, towel drying and awkward redressing. It turns out, when you break your wrist it’s easier to take clothes off then put them on.

When I left the shower, the other driver was waiting for me. Welcome to a temporary new normal. For the foreseeable future, I would now be doing everything more slowly than everyone else. I was already not exactly speedy in my daily routine. I’m proudly deliberate in my movements and actions. To me, that means thorough and thoughtful, not slow. Now I got to add in painstaking… taken to a whole new level.

We drove two hours to Mount Nebo, West Virginia, home of massive U Save Travel Plaza, a haven for truckers headed through this area. I’ve spent countless nights in this parking lot, which is nestled in heavily forested low mountains. The fresh air here is always welcome, and provided relief for me this evening.

I slept in the lower bunk because my driver was nice enough to offer it to me. We’re both big guys so I felt bad that I was relegating him to the top. I slept well considering that I had to keep getting up to pee outside. Being half asleep, I stepped as precisely as possible in the few open floor spaces between the bunk and the door. It was cold and I was in my boxer shorts so I had to hurry and finish. I’d be back outside again soon enough. My need to ‘go’ was just like back at the hospital: some weird new combination of pain, anxiousness and exasperation bringing on the all too familiar urge to take a leak. I would have used my pee bottle but I’m not about to use it in the company of others.

I was surprisingly awake and alert in the morning. I hadn’t expected that. Maybe it’s because I got to sleep on my preferred left side. Still, I thought I’d be constantly searching for a place to put my right arm. I guess at a certain point I was tired enough that it simply found somewhere comfortable and pain-free to rest.

The American Thanksgiving was a godsend. My driver had space on his trailer but no one was moving freight. So, we had a straight shot home, stopping only for bathroom breaks. The driver talked to his friends via his huge over-the-ears headset and I talked to mine on my trusty Blue Parrot behind-the-ears headset. I talked to Kim again. She suggested to go straight to the Emergency Department at Joseph Brant Hospital the next morning. Good idea so I called them to inquire. They simply said to come in the next morning. That was that; such a simple solution.

On another call, our safety director asked if I was in any condition to come to the company’s annual meeting that Saturday morning. I said that I would come if they could find someone from my area – 40 minutes from the yard – to drive me there and back. They found a guy who lives semi-close by so we set that up. I figured if really had no excuse to stay away. I’d only be sitting there and listening, and I’d have plenty of time to rest and recover in the weeks afterward. At that point, I had no idea yet how long I’d take to go through the stages of treatment and recovery.

Our safety director also started to discuss with me plans for what I might do for the company from home. He said he mentioned my situation to someone in the office and she recalled that I used to be a journalist (surely one of the very few truckers in the world who was once a purveyor of news and information). That reminded our safety director that the Policy and Procedure Manual needed an overhaul. I’d soon be spending a lot of time working on that. After all, my brain was still full functioning. Plus, with the smaller cast soon forthcoming, I’d be able the bang away slowly and clumsily on the keyboard.

When we got back to the yard, the driver and I pulled my stuff out of the truck and trailer and laid it all out on the grass. Kim would come soon and load it into her car. Meanwhile, I went into the building and let everyone ogle at my arm. Some hadn’t heard the story yet so I formulated a quick version that I would get used to repeating.

There wasn’t much else to say or do except to head home and prepare to stay for a good long while. It was going to be my longest stretch at home, by far, since I first started trucking in March 2017.

An Extended Homestand

In sports, a homestand refers to a consecutive series of games that a team plays at their home venue. A homestand can be just a few games or it can last a couple of weeks. Rarely does it extend beyond that. So, in a way, I was about to experience a protracted homestand with no foreseeable end.

While writing this, it occurred to me that most of the details of the fateful day were still abundantly clear to me. Yet everything that happened in the first few weeks afterward seemed to have devolved into one giant hodgepodge of rest and recovery, with the Christmas frenzy and medical appointments thrown in.

The first hospital visit was pretty nondescript. It took a while to get checked into the Emergency Department at Joseph Brant Hospital but I didn’t care because I had nowhere to be and nothing to do – except for to keep my arm raised as much as possible, as per the Statesville doctor’s instructions. The doctor here said that the doctor there did a really good job of resetting my bones and patching me up. He said he’d leave the huge bandage on for a week. Then I would return for my first visit to the fracture clinic.

The restfulness started nearly right away. Once I had a few days to process what happened, I started to calm down and then calm down some more. Soon I was sleeping, a lot. I was exhausted. This was to be expected considering that my adrenalin really hadn’t stopped flowing since the incident.

Besides the dwindling pain, longstanding discomfort and limited arm usage, there was going to be another constant over the coming weeks: itchiness. Intermittent, sure. But it pestered me all day long and into the night, even waking me at bizarre hours. Being a man of ideas, I quickly came up with a solution. Even though I wasn’t supposed to put anything up inside my cast – according to the ‘rules’ – I threw up my proverbial middle finger and decided to do this my own way. I found a pair of wooden chopsticks in the kitchen drawer and started using one or the other to scratch whatever spot that itched under the bandage. I kept one chopstick in the living room and the other in the bedroom. I inserted the chopstick alternately at the hand end of the bandage or at the arm end. I scratched the back of my arm as much as the front. I never had a single issue doing it. No pain; just relief.

I was looking forward to the next visit to the fracture clinic, primarily because I wanted to regain use of my elbow. Since there was nothing wrong with it, I wanted to bend it, a lot. I also wanted to make the scratching easier. But it was going to be a few days before the elbow would work without soreness because of the week of immobility.

As soon as the doctor took off the bandage, I was adamant that I wanted to wash off my arm, even though I was scared to touch it. I sweat a lot and I knew that the week of being wrapped up in thick material made my arm awfully stinky. I didn’t smell it to see if it was true. I just wanted to get the job done. With the washing completed, I prepared for the quick and easy placement of the cast. To my amusement, I got to choose the colour. I could opt for either off white, navy blue, green, purple or pink. I’m a bold and regal guy so I chose purple. The choice would get rave reviews.

The build-up to Christmas was nice because for once I was home for more than just a few days beforehand. I was of little use in setting up the house for family visits, cleaning the house and wrapping gifts. But I was there to see it happen. I was there for a fun visit to the Winter Wonders light show at the Royal Botanical Gardens, scanning the light display at night in Spencer Smith Park as we drove by, frenzied activity at the local malls, talking to neighbours about their holiday plans, a couple of really cool unexpected visits with old friends, the traditional Christmas morning gathering at my in-laws’ home, and spending invaluable time with Mom during her first Christmas without Dad. The traditional Christmas Eve gathering at Mom and Dad’s place carried a bundle of emotions, as expected.

I do most of these things to some degree every year but this year I had the time to do a lot of them. Odds are, I won’t have this amount of pre-Christmas time again until I retire. And that’s still almost 10 years off.

The oddest addition here may be exercise. I’ve been a workout addict for years and have managed to continue exercising despite my rigid trucking schedule. I’ve worked out outside in minus-ten degrees Celsius temperatures at truck stops at 10 pm, in gaps between hard rain at rest areas in the Carolinas, after long days of picking up freight and even after hearing my Dad died – once I finished writing a tribute to him on Facebook. I just had to release a lot of emotions that night. So, a broken wrist wasn’t going to stop me. It was simply going to severely affect my upper body workout. Plus, I wasn’t about to run with a cast and the ever-present danger of possibly slipping on ice. Instead, I used stairs for cardio work, I learned to stretch using only one arm for support, I began to use my daughter’s stretchy bands for highly modified upper body work. The workouts were longer and slower because I had to constantly think about how I could keep all stress and pressure off my right forearm. And, it took me a while to get down and get back up for ground stretches. All the while, through all the makeshift and augmented exercises, I remembered a poster that was taped to the wall above the basement stairwell at my old karate studio in the west end of Hamilton. It said something like this: ‘If you can’t fight with your hands, use your legs. If you can’t fight with your legs, use your mind. Above all, don’t stop fighting. Never give up.’ I saw that sign hundreds of times on my way down those stairs in the early 1990s. Back then it was just one of hundreds of martial arts mantras that I knew. Now finally it was practically useful; a supportive reminder that I’m more than just the pain in my wrist.

Cast-free, Thankfully

Suddenly I was free, in a manner of speaking. As of January 4, 2024, at about 11:40am, I was without cast. My fourth visit to the fracture clinic at Jo Brant Hospital began with a nurse using a cast saw to take it off. Don’t be alarmed. A cast saw is an oscillating power tool that uses a sharp, small-tooth blade that rapidly oscillates, or vibrates, back and forth over a small angle to cut material. It’s not scary looking. Still, I was a bit leery about having it buzzing over my arm, for about five minutes until we both pulled parts of the cast off.

I’m not sentimental about the cast. I just wanted it gone. ‘Thanks for your help but you’re not needed any longer.’ It was like a mid-season replacement player that helped get the winning team over the hump, while the star player recovered.

This removal ended five weeks – including all Christmas celebrations – in a full wrist cast. That followed my one week in that very restrictive original bandage. It was an interesting experiment in exhaustively working to keep my right forearm from doing just about everything; namely lifting, pulling, pushing, twisting. In other words, everything worth doing with an arm. To boot, it added about a pound-and-a-half to my arm.

The cast was both infinitely necessary and boundlessly inconvenient. It didn’t bother me so much during the daytime, since I had little to nothing that I needed to do in a hurry. Still, it could be irritating when trying to do things that were previously easy. For instance, each morning I take my supplements. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do: lift a tiny bottle, unscrew the cap, turn the bottle sideways and shake it easily until two capsules fall out into the other hand, then toss those capsules into my mouth. Suddenly that whole two-minute operation was thrown on its side. Everything had to be done with my left-hand, the hand with superior motor control but still … irritating, like I said. As steady as my left hand is, when I tried to carefully shake just two capsules onto the countertop, inevitably three, four or five came out before I quickly uprighted the container. Then I had to pick up each one of them, in excess of the two that I consumed, and placed them back into the bottle. Talk about first-world problems!

Putting on clothes every morning has been laborious. At least in trucking you tend to wear a lot of loose-fitting grubby items. No dress shirts or jeans. On the road I typically wear nothing with buttons or zippers. Drawstrings rule. I usually don’t wear socks either, because it’s warm in the Carolinas and my feet get hot. Speaking of socks, pulling up socks has been exasperating. Trying to get my casted arm through a coat sleeve has been tough; getting it back out even tougher. At least I had a solution for shoes: using my long shoehorn to pull them on. Fortunately, it’s been a very mild winter and I haven’t yet worn boots. Luckily, I’ve only had to cautiously push a bit of snow out of the way twice, using my right hand primarily to direct the shovel.

I’d seldom previously considered how much you had to take care when getting in and out of a car. I’ve had to start loading all the other parts of my big body before carefully puling in my right arm, then reaching around with my left arm to grab the seat belt and all in around to fasten it.

Sleeping has been the biggest impediment. That first night in the truck was obviously an outlier. Firstly, it’s winter and sometimes it’s cold and I want to be completely under the covers. The bulbous fixture on my right side has made that difficult. It’s cumbersome, and also hot. So, the arm and shoulder have had to be above the covers, and sometimes slightly cool as the air blowing from the fan above hits them. I know you may be saying, ‘then turn off the fan.’ Well, then my head and face are too hot, and my wife – who gets overheated easily at night – gets too hot. She already has enough issues staying cool while sleeping next to a human hot water bottle. Again, first world problems. No one should cry.

Twist, Turn and Repeat

On one of my first few visits to the fracture clinic, I saw a poster on the wall: an ad for body braces. A wrist brace was one of those pictured. My foreseeable future, I thought. It proved to be a natural progression. You get rid of the cast and this comes next, a piece of pliable yet sturdy hardware that slips easily on and easily off. The doctor gave me mine, to keep, and said to keep it on for two weeks when doing nearly everything with my arm. Then decrease its usage as my range of motion, flexibility and strength increases. No problem. I was well on my way to recovery, and to minimal inconvenience.

I was about to find out that wearing a cast and resting was easy. Recovery was a part-time job. A couple of hours each day was required to do it right.

My physiotherapy journey started with finding a clinic that accepts worker’s compensation cases. I had no idea that some of them didn’t because, apparently, it can be a complicated bureaucratic process. I quickly located one in downtown Burlington that I liked the sound of, based on nothing more than a quick Google search. I liked the place at first sight. It was a converted space that featured a large open room with an exposed ceiling and wooden floors that served as a yoga studio. It was surrounded on all sides by a series of private treatment rooms. Following a consultation session, I was soon lying on a table and getting my arm massaged, twisted and turned twice a week by a thirty-something tall, lean and athletic Netherlands-born guy with perfect hair. Picture a speed skater who moonlights as a male model. He’s been a good conversationalist to boot. This guy quickly had me set up with an app on which he programmed a series of exercises that would, over the span of about two months, vastly increase my range of motion and get me started on rebuilding my forearm strength and flexibility. The eight exercises are easy enough to do, provided you can bear about twenty minutes of light discomfort that eases over time, and you stick to them with religious adherence: every day, no skipping. The physiotherapy and exercises operate in tandem to give you the results you need. You don’t even need to believe they work. You just go to the appointments and follow the app’s instructions. Relief is immediate; long-term results soon follow. I am proof.

Home and Errand Land

In addition to the app-based exercises, a few times a day I do complementary therapeutic things to my wrist such as wrapping with a heating pad followed by a cooling pad, a bit of massage with the percussive massage gun that my daughter gave me for Christmas, squeezing my hacky sack ball, wrapping my magnetic pad around my wrist and rubbing my forearm with my stainless-steel scraping massage tool. The tools I need are inevitably not where I need them when I need them. Somehow, I always end up placing them in various spots around the house, usually because I want them out of the way temporarily. I understand that they can’t always stay right behind the couch in the living room. I understand this not just because my wife tells me.

That’s the thing about ‘living’ in a truck. No matter where you are in the cab, you’re always within one long or short reach of everything that you brought with you. You bring everything that you absolutely need and nothing more. It’s the opposite of home, where things get placed in random places and quickly become hard to locate amongst all the other ‘stuff’. Let’s face it. We all have far too much stuff and could probably use a good purge every year.

Which brings me to one crucial activity that I’ve been doing as my range of motion increases and my discomfort decreases: I’ve been getting rid of a lot of crap. And organizing a lot of other crap, plus non-crap: invaluable keepsakes such as Father’s Day cards that my daughter made me years ago. In early February I spent a few frenzied hours in my bedroom sifting through old paper versions of my writing, tax and financial documents and birthday cards that, over time, got shoved into several different plastic containers and file boxes in my closet. The outdated stuff got quickly tossed into the open garbage bag on the floor. My writing mementoes were more carefully sorted and stored. At some point I’ll be retired and will want to amalgamate of all my writing, the paper and electronic versions. I don’t want to look back and wonder where I placed these papers and recall that I saw them in passing, in the winter of 2024.

On Family Day I banished myself to the crawl space for a long overdue vacuuming and reorganizing. With my wrist brace on and my resolve summoned, I toiled for eight nearly uninterrupted hours shuffling back and forth on my bum and occasionally on my knees propped up by my left ‘good’ arm. The effort resulted in well-ordered rows of plastic bins that are ready for my wife’s promised purging. Plus a filth-free floor. Plus a body that was very sore for two straight days.

On February 26, I cleaned behind and under the fridge and stove. This was the first time I’d pulled out either appliance in the two years since we had our kitchen renovated. I was waiting until my wrist was up to the job.

I’ve hung a few pictures on the recently renovated lower level. Two new ones arrived from the ‘bestcanvas.ca’ picture company. I ordered one from our Newfoundland trip last summer. It’s a gorgeous landscape shot of Ten Mile Creek from the top of Gros Morne Mountain – a reminder of Kim’s and my amazing long hike. The other one, for my daughter’s room, is a wonderous view of Lucerne, Switzerland from the high level Gütschhütte south side. As I write this, two more pictures are on order: one of the Matterhorn from the village of Zermatt, Switzerland and other being the remarkable sandy tip of Point Pelee National Park here in southern Ontario.

For most folks, hanging pictures may not be a big deal but for me it’s time-consuming. I measure an exhausting number of times from all possible sides. My wife prefers to ‘eyeball’ before hanging, which is why she is forever banned from hanging any more pictures. She’s way better at other stuff. After I hang a picture, you can measure it from any possible side and I guarantee accuracy within a millimetre. Careful about accusing me of inaccuracy, unless you’re up for a vigorous debate.

Tuesday, February 27

I still have to do some long overdue organizing: many reference books on our bookshelf have long outlived their usefulness and need to go somewhere other than here. I can’t bear to throw away any of my favourite novels (A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The Corrections, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Alias Grace, The Shipping News) nor a few concert tour books from years back. Chief among them is the ‘guide’ to the Springsteen ‘Born in the USA’ tour. Best concert of all time, Exhibition Stadium, Toronto, August 1985!

I also still have to do a seasonal backing up all my photos to several different drives. You can’t be too safe with a lifetime of memories. I want to finally add all my usernames and passwords to a book that Mom bought me a few years ago.

One huge burden off my plate are the things I’m not good at: stuff that involves a hammer, screwdriver, nuts and bolts, paint and drywall filler … fix it stuff. I had our local contractor friend over and showed him all the items that require patching, replacing, and a significant tightening with more torque than I have available. (I don’t own a ratchet set.) He’s planning a half day of work here soon to do it all. Meanwhile, I have done and will continue to do all the super easy stuff that tends to crop up, like replacing light bulbs and the furnace filter, and tightening small screws loosened by time and toil. I also have the basic tools to attempt ‘next level’ projects such as replacing the footpads under the dining room chairs and tightening anything small that’s affixed by Allen keys.

You already know I’m an excellent picture hanger.

I’m also a kickass sweeper and vacuum-er. -ist? -acist?

Lamentably, window cleaning will have to wait until temperatures allow for windows to be opened for more than a few minutes. I hate window cleaning as much as anyone, but I can’t live long with dirty windows and the cracks they slide along.

Rekindling the Canadian in Me

For 25 years Mom and Dad owned a cottage on Lake Manitouwabing, about half an hour outside of Parry Sound, Ontario. It was their oasis, a home away from home, the result of many years of scrimping. Our regular visits there were occasions we treasure, especially with Dad’s passing this past June. My parents bought the property, upon which they built the cottage with friends, in the mid-1980s, when my brother Rob and I were in our late teens.

It was truly a cottage, a modernized version of the old-style shack and shingles. The huge front was all glass and allowed for a spectacular view of the lake no matter where you were in the main area. The place was filled with old furniture, clothes and kitchen utensils that were either brought from home or given by friends. Scattered outside alongside the spacious deck and the tree line were all sorts of ornaments and crafts that my Mom and guests had made throughout the years.

Until the cottage purchase and construction, we travelled a lot each summer as a family, often exploring Ontario’s near north, cottage country – as it’s known colloquially to Ontarians. I now know that this is how Mom and Dad came to love this area. Towns such as Bracebridge, Gravenhurst, Port Carling and Huntsville came to represent jumping off points from which we discovered the region: namely the many lakes and their infinite opportunities for summer fun.

Mom and Dad were native Manitobans so they were encountering this area at the same time we were. The places we saw and the things we did, they are what I came to associate with being Canadian. I’d been to Toronto and Niagara Falls enough times to know plenty about their urban offerings, which are infinite: lots going on all the time with wall-to-wall people at nearly every turn. But the sojourns up north opened my eyes to different things: open skies, the freshest air, beaches and sand, camp fires and how to build them; the looming and wide-ranging threats of mosquitoes, black flies, leeches and black bears; eating freshly caught fish; the need for sunblock; spreading yourself out on a beach towel to aim for an even tan.

I associate all of this stuff with Canada. You can take some or all of it and transpose it to a far-off land – U.S., Europe, or otherwise – and it wouldn’t be the same. It would feel unacceptable, somehow. It would feel un-Canadian.

In my truck travels in the U.S., I occasionally see a place – a lake, for instance – that I might imagine to be a lot like a lake in cottage country – although much smaller. It can feel very much the same but there’s always something there that makes it feel different: the people speak differently, they listen to different music (no Tragically Hip, for instance), they don’t know how to dress for a cool summer evening, they don’t appreciate the importance of mosquito repellant and a solidly constructed canoe, they don’t have stuff from their local Canadian Tire store and most of them don’t get their coffee drinks from Tim Hortons.

Transpose all this Canadiana to winter time. At least half of America – the bottom half – doesn’t have even one lone snow shovel in their garage. They don’t know what lake effect snow is. Most don’t own a parka or even know what that is. (I’ve asked.) They don’t need to put a coat on their dog before a walk. They don’t know the glory and history of ‘snow days.’ They don’t love hockey enough!

Their government decisions aren’t made in parliament. They don’t have a monopoly on all the maple syrup that’s produced worldwide. Their Indigenous people didn’t invent two bastions of Canadiana, the kayak and the aforementioned canoe. They don’t have my favourite place in the world: the entire Canadian East Coast.

They don’t have my family, friends, my personal history, my footprint in the world.

The Canada I describe is the country I miss so much when I’m away. This is the reason that I regularly renew my Sirius XM Radio subscription and download a bunch of Canadian podcast onto my phone, so I can get Canadian programming that gives me the zeitgeist of my country, as I’m travelling in another country some two hundred-plus days a year.

On the subject of such numbers, by time I return to the road, I will have been home for just over one hundred days. That’s been enough time for a solid rekindling of my Canadian flame. But for me there’s no such thing as too much time at home.

That said, it’s important to note that I’m returning to driving duty for my Canadian company, who have been very supportive during my time away from the road. I’ve kept in touch with them via our safety director, who has been most helpful. They have alleviated a lot of the stress that comes with such an injury.

Sensing A Return to The Road

The latter part of February, 2024

On Sunday February 11, I joined tens of millions of people in North America and around the world. Which means that I watched the Super Bowl. The game was decent, the ending superb. I simultaneously indulged my inexplicable obsession with the fairytale Taylor-Travis relationship. This was likely the last big sports event of my sojourn. This may not seem important to some folks but when you love sports like I do, it’s a big deal. I hate missing big games on my fifty-five-inch basement TV with surround sound while stretched out on my super comfy sectional couch. My wife and daughter don’t like watching sports so I get a lot of uninterrupted viewing.

Recently I had my last visit to the fracture clinic, except for a follow-up in May. The x-ray showed a considerable recovery. The doctor agreed that the wrist is at a point where I can’t do damage to it by ramping up my (arm’s) activity level. My last physiotherapy session is imminent. The therapist has already said my wrist is roughly eighty percent healed. Annoyingly, he admitted the last twenty percent is the slowest part of the recovery and could take months, up to a year. I’ve noticed that my wrist has responded increasingly well to the exercises with each passing week. Pulling things has gotten easier but pushing is still uncomfortable if my wrist is at the wrong angle. Stiffness is still there every day, worse in the mornings and after periods of immobility. That’s part of the last twenty percent, apparently.

I’ve begun counting down ‘last’ occurrences of other things during my extended time home: my daily walks with our spry but elderly Maltese poodle Sydney, preparing an actual lunch instead of pulling a sandwich or wrap out of the truck fridge, round the clock access to three TVs with a couple of popular subscription services, a choice of clean and reasonably fashionable clothing, seeing and talking to my daughter in person on a regular basis, more than three consecutive nights of sleeping beside my wife, and getting more than just a few hours of quality time with her on the weekend.

I lament the family events I’ll be missing when they happen on a Sunday, the day I leave each week. On a lesser note, I know I’ll miss being able to go to the store any time I’m in the mood for a treat that I’ve run out of.

I’ve been used to all these things for years already. But for me, the time away never gets easier to accept. I simply try to make the most of every moment here.

On a positive note, my living room couch cushions will have the opportunity to regain their structural integrity, in the spots where I’ve created quite a good butt groove while writing.

My amazing wife assures me that she’ll miss having me around so much. It took her weeks to get used to seeing so much of me. She loves her independence and there was concern that I’d infringe on it. Fortunately, I’ve left her alone enough so that she could watch her favourite baking shows and old-time mysteries in peace. The Great British Baking Show and Matlock are recipients of my generosity.

Meanwhile, my wonderful daughter, who’s no homebody and is often out late, has seen much more of me. I get the feeling that’s a good thing, except when I bug her about forgetting to do this or that around the house.

Weeks ago, well in advance of my return to the road, I bought a headlamp, a kickass one with a high number of lumens. It shines mighty bright on high mode and will easily put a clear focus on any obstacle in my way. Chances are I will never have to, or get to, write an article like this ever again. Except maybe an amped up fictionalized version. I envision a dark comedy featuring an extended scene of Room Two, featuring a tight shot of the needle going in, followed by one slow crack of my wrist bones one after another. If you don’t like that visual, you can simply fast forward to the part where I get the pretty purple cast.