Medium Short: Skid, Drop & Roll

Bruising, barfing, and staying the course

This is the toilet in the building where my bike got tuned up. That would be the bike I dove off, not the toilet I was barfing in. It’s been a strange week. (Photo by me.)

Welcome to the latest Medium Short, a weekly accountability practice highlighting what I am reading, writing, and doing along the unmarked trail towards #IndustrialHealing. This is a personal update — my more professional writing is, as with all of my articles, freely available through this link.

[Parental advisory: This week’s update contains graphic language which may concern parents who thought their grown children had their acts together. Reader discretion is advised.]

It’s been a strange week. A cat substitute-writing for me would have been par for the course, frankly. I’ll get to that in the writing section, below. Staying on course here. On course. Course.

For context on the strangeness before diving into the usual reading, writing, and doing:

I was biking along the river path, headed home from the wilds of Lasalle where I had gone to update my health card per the Quebec government’s instructions (which I couldn’t complete because the system went down shortly after I arrived — oh well) when the spikes on my winter bike tires were no match for the deep icy ruts on the bike path. I skidded, lost control, and dove into the rather hard ground.

I lay face down, starfish-like, for a few seconds as I took inventory of my various bits.

By the time a kindly runner got to me asking if he should call 911, I was in good spirits. I stood up, tested out my body and my bike, had a good laugh with the runner, and carried on home.

While it probably wasn’t an Oscar-winning stunt move, I think I fell well because the bruising is nicely distributed along points of my left side — no one body part took too much impact. This is key to success: many contributors to hard (ouch, so hard) work. Aside from the bruises and a bit of a stiff neck, I really am okay. Although…

Later that same day, after dinner in fact, I had an (unrelated to the sidewalk dive, I’m pretty sure) recurrence of RBS (random barfing syndrome, as I call it ), a mysterious thing that happened to me a lot in 2021, but which I thought I was over after some significant dietary adjustments. I…