THE inaugural run of the travel van went well. Until D2 took a bad spill on a snowy mountainside, ended up in an emergency room with a concussion and a whiplash injury. In the ER, her eyes were jinxing around as she tried to track the doc’s finger across her field of vision.
A major brain bruising. They wouldn’t let her leave without a CAT scan.
A gymnast in childhood and adolescence, she’s no stranger to emergency rooms. Going fast on anything is risky, of course: a floor mat, a balance beam, a snowboard. Operator error, she said. Too much speed going into a turn.
She was pretty wobbly after the mishap and, once she got her bearings, still had to snowboard four miles to get to the bottom.
Other than that, we’re all healthy. Hope the same is true where you are.
D3 has recovered from Covid 19 and started a new job. She quit the one where she was the only employee who would mask up. She was the very last to test positive. That was some days after the place shut down because everybody except her was out sick.
It’s a great relief to see that she’s apparently not one of these “long covid” cases, people who can’t seem to shake the virus.
I had an experience like that 30 years ago. Started with a high fever, a fever like nothing I had ever experienced before, and nothing since. The sweats and chills finally broke but I just didn’t get well. Spent 6 months slowly going downhill, about 16 months at the bottom, and 6 more climbing back.
I had enjoyed robust good health before that, and did again afterwards for 30 years, right up to the cancer thing in 2019. Other hiccups, surgeries from motorcycling injuries, etc., I discount that as the price of admission. So on the bottom line, only two systemic health issues over the course of 66 years? All good before, between and after?—I’ll take it! Thank you, Jesus, Goddess, Great Spirit, dumb-ass luck randomly landing on us primates lost in space…
A family photo taken November 4, 1989. The day the long virus thing started. Easy to remember, it was my sister-in-law’s wedding.
Night wedding. Note D2 and D3 falling asleep standing up.
Whatever brought on the fever and then kept after me, it mainly messed with my hydration and blood volume. Normally, you can see every vein in my arms and hands from across the room. But when this thing was going on, if a tech could even find a vein on me she’d instantly collapse it. They finally resorted to using the finest needles available, and that worked; needles normally used on infants.
One doc thought it was a bug I had picked up in some wretched place in Central America. Another thought it might be scar tissue on my pituitary, perhaps from a head injury I’d sustained in a car wreck a few years before.
But the ailment was never diagnosed with any confidence. A Mass General doc who had done pituitary surgery on a friend of mine at the newspaper told me it’s almost certainly viral, it’ll run its course, we won’t ever know what it was.
Sure enough, that’s what happened. I got well over time with no medical intervention whatsoever.
There she is, wheels back on, new sneakers.
The half in the bag thing, that wasn’t D2 cracking her coconut.
No, that was Buck-a-Buck, Buck, Bucky, variations applied by the little girl in my charge Mondays through Fridays.
One day she’s set to go home at 5:30, the usual hour. I put Buck in the canvas bag with the snow boots, the snow pants, the fuzzy hat with the bear ears on it. Come bedtime that evening, Buck’s nowhere to be found. Nobody’s going to get any sleep… at all.
Did Buck get in the bag?
Yes, Buck was most certainly in the bag the last I saw him.
Well, the bag’s here. Buck’s not in it.
D1 and her husband call in Buck’s stunt double. This back-up Buck, he’s not quite a ringer. Hasn’t been squeezed for a year, dropped, trod upon, used for a napkin, a nose wipe, a tear blotter, hasn’t been run through the washing machine…
They give it a try, put pseudo Buck in the crib. The evening wears on to a sad little voice from the end of the hall upstairs.
“Not Buck… Not Bucky…”
I know for a fact Buck was in the bag. So I say, you know, by the time you got home I’ll bet he was only half in the bag.
They check the car… sure enough, there he lies, limp on a floor mat. Where anybody half in the bag might end up.
The little girl beams at the happy presentation of the one and only Buck-a-Buck the True. She clutches him to her heart and closes her eyes.
Two random pics and I’ll see you next time…
Deer by the back fence a few days ago, just as snow started falling. That’s a one-eared doe I always see around here, her yearling and one of the twins she had last spring. The other twin was nearby.
A pair of 1949 front fenders I picked up in New York yesterday, to replace the ones that rotted off the ’49 truck.
A nice find. No body filler, minimal welding required, lots of character. Will follow up with better pics later this week.
Tony DePaul, February 21, 2021, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
Years ago my wife sent me out during a freezing winter to look for our son’s beloved blanket. A long drive, extremely uncomfortable, and no luck. We found it, finally, behind the couch. Glad your granddaughter’s was closer at hand. It’s cold out there!
Ha! That’s grit, Robert. Thanks for reading, and writing in.
Is it true that new tires foretell of long rides? As said before, new tires are slippery.
Mystery illnesses are a bummer. I had a problem in 2014 – recent enough to think doctors could diagnose anything. After a couple of visits to my GP (it’s a cold, you’ll shake it off), visits to a clinic and a new GP, one to the ER, four months, dozens of tests and procedures, 35 pounds lost, a cardiologist came up with an idea, ran the tests, and found the problem. Amazing they know so much and yet it seems to come down to guessing more often than is comfortable. I’d be dead if I listened to my GP.
Concussions take a while to “settle” – so I’ve heard. Reminders to take it easy are always welcome, even if formally rebuked.
Spring is almost here – can’t wait for the first ride.
Jeez… man, yes, you definitely need to act as your own advocate in the medical system. Glad to hear that you did, Dennis.
About concussions, indeed. A bad one is a trip through the looking glass. You realize how fragile your short-term memory is.
Two weeks after I moved to Providence from Maine someone ran a red light on North Main Street and t-boned me on the left-front fender. My head hit the door glass with enough force to push the window frame out about a half-inch from the weather stripping.
Granted, I was driving a tin foil Nissan econobox at the time, but bending steel parts with your head is not an experience I would wish on anybody. My head hitting the glass sounded like breaking a rack of pool balls.
Glad everyone in the growing family has survived their crisis … must have inherited it from the old man. If like him, they’ll go out looking for more adventure.
Lucky find on those fenders. Not a 48, or a 50, but an exact ’49. Treat those like gold. That ups the street value of that truck big time.
Ah, well that year I cited was a bit of shorthand on my part, amigo. Those fenders were made for three years running, might have been stamped out in ’48, ’49 or ’50.
What’s more, they’re not the correct fenders for my half-ton F-1 truck. They bolt up exactly the same, same inner fenders, same radiator saddle, same grille, but they never came stock on the F-1. They were on the 3/4 ton F-2 all the way up to the 2-ton F-6.
The seller said these fenders I bought came off an F-6.
The wheel opening is a bit larger on these fenders, and the surfaces where the upper fenders bolt to the lowers look a bit different. On my next post I’ll show some close-up pics on the differences.
Bottom line: my half-ton truck will look like a 3/4 ton now. They both came from the factory with 16-inch wheels. It’s not like the F-2 needed F-6 fenders up front but… it had ’em.
So sorry to hear of Jenna’s (D-2) fall and I hope she’s much better now.
And I’m happy to hear D-3 has recovered from Covid and that she quit working with people who wouldn’t wear masks. What are they, some kind of nuts?
I can’t imagine how you suffered all those years ago with that hideous mystery illness. It must have been traumatic for you.
I hope you can get the vaccine soon. I’m getting my first shot Feb. 27.
Your little girl must be thrilled to be reunited with her BFF, Bucky. So glad he was found.
So glad to hear you have a date certain for the vaccine, Ellie. Pam and I applied today, I imagine it’ll be a while before we hear.
The mystery bug of 1990 or whenever it was, yes, that definitely was a challenging time. We were always a month away from dumping the house to get out from under the mortgage. But something good always happened at the last minute and we made it through to the next month every time.
I was AWL from the Journal (as opposed to AWOL) for almost a year, I think. Friends sent me non-deadline freelance work I could do whenever I was able. Tim Murphy passed the hat at work once and showed up at our door with a lifesaving six weeks worth of mortgage dough.
The girls were small, Pam was home raising them in those days, but she went back to work for a year, that was invaluable. I carried the mortgage, she carried everything else, and we made it through. When I went back to work she went back to being a full-time mom, which was always the thing she enjoyed most.
I really wasn’t fit to go back to work, still had a rough three or four months ahead (as I would later find out), but I lied and said I was raring to go. No choice in the matter, HR told me the job was going away if I didn’t come back. So I did.
And Tim saved the day yet again. I was working for him at the time. He let me sack out on the floor of the news bureau for maybe 90 minutes a day. Downtown was none the wiser.
I can’t imagine all you went through with that horrific mystery illness. Just not knowing what it was for all that time would be enough to drive anyone mad. Add to that, the thought of losing your home, then your job, then going back to work while still ill.
This is a horror story.
You are a trouper, that’s for sure.
But you kept them both, thanks to your Pam and a little help from Tim and your friends.
I was out in the boonies in the Pawtucket office during the 90s and wasn’t aware of this at the time. Sometimes word didn’t get to us for a while, if at all.
I got my vaccine appt. by calling a number on Pawtucket’s Covid website, just one call, with no call back message and no holding on for an hour. Amazing. Here’s hoping you’re able to get an appt. soon.
It was rough but we were young, too. Wouldn’t want to go through that wringer now.
The mortgage was a killer. It took every penny of my take-home pay for the first 2-1/2 weeks of the month. And, as I say, we were a one-income family at the time. Pam was home with the girls for ten or twelve years, I think. With that one year in the middle where she had to go back.
I read stories in the Times and the WaPo about these people going through long covid and completely identify when they talk about the viral brain fog. Every little task becomes so difficult.
I read, too, that some researchers think long-term viral infections can set you up for lymphoma down the road, so… who knows? Viruses are strange little bugs. Not really alive, I’ve read. Not in the way that bacteria are alive. Not made of cells but they behave as if they’re alive. They evolve and adapt… Witness these new covid variants cropping up everywhere.
Pam checked it out today and got us vaccine appointments for March 10. Right nearby, too. About a mile away, down at Sockanosset Cross Road.
So good to get the latest update Tony…a bright spot in this winter of a continuing pandemic. I loved the Buck story! When I was little, a plush, bright red Huckleberry Hound toy was my spirit animal and constant companion.
Eventually, he became so grimy (from love) that my mom insisted that “Huck” needed a bath..and into the Maytag he went. Unfortunately, he suffered serious injuries in the spin cycle, including a broken neck. We didn’t have a backup and I was devasted.
We knew he would never survive the dryer, so my sweet mom spread out towels in the sunniest part of our yard and laid ol’ Huck there to recuperate. I wouldn’t leave his side, and she wouldn’t leave me…so we sat there each holding onto one of his fingerless paws. He eventually dried out, and my mom used her big rug-braiding needle to make sure his head remained on his body. We love our “velveteen rabbits” and I love the fact that parents understand.
Ha! Nice story, Babs. It’s such fun to see kids living in that magic world they inhabit.
Helmet on riding, whether on snowboard or motorcycle saves the day. Hoping that D2 rebounds and puts the fall into the lessons learned book.
Fenders? Dang.
I had always intended to do the rust repair on the front fenders, at least. These other ones called my name. I’m not really sure how they even came to my attention on eBay. I wasn’t looking for them.
Beautiful as always, Tony! All still well here in Maine, even if we did have to drive to Greenville (!) from Scarborough a couple of days ago to get shotted. At least that part of the pandemic is now behind us…
That’s very odd, Dave, considering that they probably drove the vaccine past the Portland area to get to the Moosehead Lake region three hours north of you. Unless it came in on a float plane! that might explain Greenville.
Today’s our first opportunity to sign up here in RI.
“I discount that as the price of admission.”
That made me laugh! The Wise Man speaks!
Haha… To paraphrase Yogi Berra, if you choose to ride motorcycles you’re signing up to eventually take a 2-hour nap in the street from one to four.
Sorry about D2, Tony, hope that all turns out all right, sounds like she is a tough gal, must take after her old man who can outdo them all. Had a Buck myself, only mine was a runt teddy bear that went by the handle of Little Ted. I think we all have one, or rather had one. Great pic of the deer, they are magnificent creatures and the only thing I want to shoot them with is a camera. Love that old ’49 truck, it and your iron piggy an outstanding pair. That new pic of her is beautiful. Hope things go best for everyone, and all stay safe and uninjured.
Cheers Tony.
Thanks, Terry. D3 had “Flat Ted,” a stuffed bear we had found flattened in the street and encrusted with road salt.
A good bath in Dawn, and Flat Ted while still flat, would be all good, just like those little ducks. Does D3 still has him, tucked away somewhere?
I’d be surprised if she didn’t.
A fun read on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, not fun to think of my favorite van converter getting a concussion and having to travel four miles to get to the bottom. How far up was she?
Oh, those parents who hope replacement Buck, or Bankie, or Monkey is ever going to soothe the tired owner of said stuffed animal. No memories have been made with the fake twin. The smell is not there. The ears are whole. Thankfully, they found the first Buck.
New fenders. I’m glad others know the value of the parts, and offer them for sale, and haven’t sent them off to the car crusher. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Buck has his own unique scent. In abundance. He went through the washer this weekend and I’ll bet he still has it.
Pam says I should have noted that Jenna had her helmet on.