Friday, June 14, 2013

Post-rafting clean up

We put up the tent in the back yard to dump out all the sand and spiders. The kids are pretty much experts at putting together the tent poles and they could probably put the tent up themselves by now.
 
Pictures of my rafting bruises about four days after I got them. Tough chick.
 
I was coughing during the rafting trip, and two days after we got home, I noticed that my ear hurt. I dropped everything and ran to the Instacare, where I was diagnosed with an ear infection. I picked up my antiobiotics before I came home from the doc and started them immediately. I don't mess around with ear infections, seeing how one almost killed me twelve years ago.
In May, 2001, my boyfriend, my sister and I arrived at a Moab campsite at 1 pm on a Friday night, intending to do a river rafting event on Saturday with a big group. Sometime after 1 am, I woke up with bad ear pain and I knew it was an ear infection. Although I don't remember it, I apparently insisted that I go to the hospital in the middle of the night, then drive home right away. No one had slept for the whole night, but I was persuasive enough I guess. The driver fell asleep in Green River (about an hour out of Moab) and the car rolled a bunch of times and landed on the roof. I was ejected into the median of the freeway. I had a broken vertebrae, broken clavicle, broken rib and damaged lung. I had a head injury and lots of road rash. My sister was left hanging from her seatbelt upside down in the car and she had a damaged lung and some other traumas. The driver wasn't injured. I spent a week in the hospital in Grand Junction and six weeks out of work and out of my mind due to the head injury. So everything recovered except I feel like my personality is different. (Is it possible that I'm less inhibited and more fun? You're surprised that I say that? You'd really be surprised at how uptight and unfunny I was before.) So good thing my ear infection struck in the days after the rafting trip this year, instead of the day before. I wouldn't have survived it this time.

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