Broken elbow

by Miguel de Icaza

Last week I broke my elbow when I fell off my bike. The humerous "tip" got broken and required surgery and three large screws to hold it in place. I wish at least I had broken it as part of a facinating story, involving a remote country, spies and a distress call. But all I got is "I was coming back from work and fell".

I have tried to reconstruct the tragic events of 8/12 to find the failure on the system. But I have come up empty handed so far.

What I do know is that in the morning I used Nat's air pump on my bike and got a kick out of it. I remember thinking "I think I over inflated these bad boys".

That afternoon after a frantic hacking expedition removing "throw NotImplementedExceptions" from our new code and filing some compiler bugs, I realized I only had 20 minutes left to meet my wife on bthe opposite side of the river.

The lock holder had loosened up, I took the lock out and put it on my back pack.

Within 10 meters of getting on the bike I landed emarasingly in front of a bunch of guests of the Residence Inn, the hotel next door to the office. Being the proud man that I am, I picked the bike and got moving right away, took me a while to realize that I could not move my left arm.

My doctors have been awesome. My only complain is that I had to wait six days to get my surgery done and on the ER it took them the best part of four hours to give me a pain killer.

I started right away my rehabilitation. Took me almost two days to get my hand to lift again, and my fingers are moving now, but they cant really exert any pressure. My nose has more strength. I also painfully learned that you are supposed to keep your affected limbs above your hearth, so even if the fingers can move (and I managed to type a paragraph the other day) I cant dfind a position that wont make my hand swell.

This comes at a very bad time: this is the third year on a row that I have missed FooCamp; The Google sponsored Mono students are progressing by leaps and bounds on their projects, Mono is getting ported to two new platforms, Minosse was completed. and my hacking has stopped for the time being. In particular, am very proud of a new htp pipeline design that we are about to land in Mono which uses iterators extensively to maximize the use of the threadpool. Luckly it got done before the accident.

Reading books has also slown down, its very uncomfortable so am doing most of my reading from the computer. I almost finish reading all the web.

Posted on 21 Aug 2005