Aug 12 - Hamid's cycling accident

I thought that I'd already mentioned this in the blog but apparently not.  I've had so many emails and texts on this that I missed blogging.  Both David and Aaron asked about my note.  Hopefully we will find him in good spirits and recovering nicely today !

I had talked to Hamid a day or so after the accident, during the weekend.  He was at his apartment in MD at that point, with his son Ali helping.  Shab came up from Florida on Monday.

He told me that he came down a hill, found fine sand at the bottom making it almost like "black ice" (his words) and realized that he couldn't make the turn, went through a gap in a hedge to the grass beyond hoping to stop there but crashed into a ditch.

Riders following heard him call out and they had to climb back up the hill to get cell phone service and call for an ambulance.  

He broke his wrist in three places and shattered and/or cracked two lumbar vertebrae. Emergency sent him home, believe it or not.  That should never have happened.  16 hours of surgery later, pins and reconstructed vertebrae and he's got a one year recovery period.  

The surgery was happening while I drove down to Reading after Matthew's birth.  I talked to Shab twice that evening before and between surgeries.  Since I was driving and would be up all night, I told her to call "whenever he got out of surgery".  That was close to midnight, from the first bout, and they were keeping him under to go in and "do a little more" (Shab' words).  That little more was 5.5 more hours after the already 9.5 hours.  I considered driving down to be with her but Hamid wouldn't know that I was there anyway.

They had to cut him from the front and back to do all this, so besides the bone healing, he's got a lot of muscle and tissue mending.  

He is lucky that he's not paralyzed from the waist down, especially after being sent home.  That could have easily done more damage and might account for some of the numbness that he now feels in his left leg.  The spine specialist had to sort out the nerves and bone fragments, cementing and pinning all this back together.  

Time will tell how the recovery goes and whether he has any permanent loss of flexibility, numbness and/or motor control.  As far as I know, they expect full recovery.  I will hear more today.

He's had some visitors, who found him in good spirits.  Right after the operations, however, he was a mess mentally, drugs and pain obviously leaving him depressed by all this.  He was very hard to understand; I guess that's a result of tubes down your throat during the operation ?