Adjusting To The Halo - The First Two Weeks At Home (Days 3-18)

I’m writing this blog for two primary reasons - one, to capture the story and share it as it happens (while I take great delight in sharing my condition on any given day in great detail to whomever might ask, this might provide updates for those a little further outside my QuarantineSphere whom I’m not interacting with on a regular basis) - but also because the minute it was decided I was going to start a Halo Journey, frenetic Googling turned up a small handful of blogs by other people documenting their experiences in similar circumstances. Those blogs provided invaluable insight and advice to this terrifically strange and unique phase of life I’m now entering for the next few months.

Because it is my wont (and because I have more than a little extra free time on my hands these days) I may get rather granular at times with the details, or I may just provide semi-regular updates on how things are going - hard to say at this point. I don’t have a lot of planning going into this blog, I’m just here for the ride and to jot down a few thoughts and collect a few memories for the future. And if someone who I have never and may never meet finds this blog, years from now, and finds it in any way resourceful or helpful as they or someone they know gets outfitted with their very own Halo, well, then my time here will be very well spent indeed.

But for now, let’s have a recap of the first couple of weeks of Living With A Halo.

After consideration, I decided to peg the day the Halo was installed (not sure what other verb to use there, really), Wednesday September 9th, 2020 as Day 0. So Thursday 9/10/20 became Day 1, and so on from there. I came home from the hospital on Day 3. Dr. Lynne said that the “listed protocol time” for wearing a Halo brace is 6 months - however it seems that can vary somewhat based on the severity of the break, how quickly the bones heal, etc - many people report a Halo time of three to four months. So in my mind, I’m already “counting up” to Day 180 - and if I’m able to get released early for Good Behavior, well fantastic.

But that’s a long way off. For now, it’s just a matter of Getting Through Today.

As I recap the first two weeks, it might work best to break out some topics individually.

Mobility / Activity - For the first couple of days, every single movement was slow, difficult, and (often) painful. I was still weak and adjusting to my new center of gravity as provided by the Halo, and even simple movements like getting out of a chair or turning around while standing had to be done at about 10% speed. While nothing else on my body really hurt, everything in your upper body connects to your neck somehow - so using my arms to lift or brace myself and many minor upper body adjustments or movements if not done at the absolute easiest intensity and speed would cause bolts of pain to shoot through the neck. The Halo keeps your neck and spine immobilized, but I still had a lot of damaged nerves and muscles that would fire off warnings anytime they felt movement from elsewhere. On Day 5 I managed to get out of a chair by myself without any assistance, which felt like a huge win. Every day after that for the first two weeks seemed to bring a measurable increase in strength and ability. My lower body was more or less unscathed, so once I was standing I was able to do some knee raises and other light lower body activity and stretches just to try to keep the blood flowing and the body moving as much as possible.

The one lower body side effect I did experience was a good bit of swelling in my legs and feet - turns out sitting for 22 hours a day isn't the most conducive to good circulation. Propping my feet up seemed to help the most, so as much as possible especially while sleeping I continue to try to elevate my legs to keep the blood flowing. 

I waited until Week Two at home (Day 11) to climb the stairs at home up to the second floor, but by then my stability and balance had progressed to the point where - as long as I moved slowly and deliberately - I felt like I could move in just about any way I needed to (within the locked in confines of the Halo, or course). As long as my torso and head stay locked in the same plane, I can get around pretty well. Easy, slow movement is the key, especially while everything that's damaged and inflamed in the neck heals here in the early stages.

Pain - Overall I feel remarkably fortunate to have as little ongoing, acute pain as I do. I think I expected more, honestly, but - as long as I’m remaining still, or moving at a glacial pace - it’s more levels of discomfort, if anything. I was prescribed oxycontin as needed coming out of the hospital, but by Day 6 or so was mostly just taking ibuprofen as they actually seemed to give better relief for what negative effects I was feeling. Week One at home was mostly dominated by head pain from getting used to the screws of the Halo brace in my skull. I don’t feel the individual “pin” sites, as they’re called - rather, the four of them surrounding my head result in more a feeling of a tight band encircling my head at that level. This ongoing tension headache would come and go throughout the day, but slowly lessened into Week Two, I think mostly as my body became accustomed to the sensation. Week Two actually started bringing more neck pain - likely because as I was able to move around more and more, the Halo has to prevent me from moving in any way I shouldn’t - and every time it limits me, it stops me right as my neck starts to protest whatever action I was about to try to do. This builds up through the day and tends to get worse in the evening as my fatigue also increases. Overall, very manageable though, and for that I am very grateful.

Sleeping - The most consistently painful action I felt the first few days having the Halo were trying to move from lying on my back and getting onto my feet, and vice versa. I never really slept very well in the hospital, and the first night at home, trying to get comfortable in any position was almost impossible at first. Eventually I decided to just try sleeping while in the most discomfort-less position possible, sitting straight up in a recliner. It actually worked pretty well. I would stay up as late as possible into the night to get as tired as possible, and then would be able to fall asleep for at least a few hours at a time. It’s an odd sensation - when you fall asleep while sitting, usually your head starts to fall to one side or in front (sometimes jerking you back away, right?) - but in a Halo, my head is perfectly suspended and locked in place. Waking up was a trip sometimes, trying to figure out why it felt like my head was floating in space before my senses caught up and remembered the contraption into which I was now built. I established a pretty good routine of sleeping in at least 2-3 decent chunks throughout the night - often I would wake up for a while and it would take me a while to get back to sleep, but I would keep my phone and books close at hand and just tried to embrace a multi-phasic sleep schedule for the time being.

Activity - So what AM I doing? Getting really good at sitting in a chair, that’s for sure. Thankfully I had plenty of accumulated vacation time at work, and Lindsay was doing almost all her adjunct teaching from home, so we were able to really just spend a lot of time sitting in the living room together, reading, watching movies and TV shows, gaming, etc. We have a phrase we use for those days that happen a couple of times per year, often a Saturday with no obligations, where we just make it a lazy day, forget about the concept of time and the calendar and adult responsibilities and do nothing but sit on the couch for the entirety of a day and and eat snacks and just hang out together - we call them “The Days That Don’t Exist”. Well - that first week from home was “The Week That Didn’t Exist” - and it was honestly pretty great just to focus on rest and recovery. While it feels really strange to be at home and not be able to be as active as I normally am, I also have no shortage of books to read, video games to play, and movies to watch, so I’m certainly not going to get bored anytime soon! I’m very fortunate in that I am able to work entirely remotely, so on Day 12 I went “back to work” from my home office. It was actually really nice to achieve another step in the feeling of a normal routine, and gave me another (seated) activity to pour my time and returning energy into.

Overall - life is good. Yes, the Halo is requiring some significant adjustments to life right now and forcing me to be a lot more deliberate than I usually am with every single action - but when I consider how much worse my accident could have been, I feel extraordinarily fortunate. When I consider just how much harder all this would be a broken leg, or wrist, or cracked ribs, etc - it makes me realize that my injury and limitations are not nearly as bad as many people who might be in a similar situation. All any of us can ever do is to respond in the most positive, beneficial way to the circumstances we find ourselves in - I remind myself constantly that mindset is half the battle on a journey such as this one.

Next Entry: Day Twenty Two

Graham is a willing and attentive HHCP 
(Home Health Care Pupper)
and mostly just demands payment in food

Part Two - The Hospital

Once I was surrounded by Trained Medical Experts, the situation escalated quickly - both in their response and my understanding of the severity of my predicament. Turns out Medical Experts take neck injuries VERY seriously (who would have guessed?) A hard neck brace secured, I was wheeled back to an ER table and descended upon by a small horde of medical professionals. I repeated the short version of my story to what seemed like a dozen different people, blood draws were taken, an IV was inserted, and before too long I was being wheeled back for a CT scan. There was a palpably equal sense of relief and astonishment from each doctor I spoke to - relief that in spite of a clearly serious neck injury I was experiencing no loss of motor control or sensation anywhere in my body - and astonishment that after suffering said neck injury I had proceeded to climb unassisted out of a ditch and then spend 3 or so hours meandering down to the hospital 50 miles away from where the accident had taken place.

What I quickly realized as nothing short of miraculous was that - other than the obvious pending neck diagnosis - I seemed to be in remarkably good shape. In terms of acute injuries, other than my neck, I had a decent sized cut on one knee, a small abrasion on my right shoulder, and a small spattering of other cuts and bruises. Every other major limb and part of my body seemed to have escaped unscathed. I can’t say for sure that I must have landed almost entirely on my head during whichever part of the plunge my body impacted the ground the most, but from the lack of other injuries, it sure seemed that way. Regardless, the doctors ordered immediate CT scans and x-rays of my entire body from the waist up just to ensure there were no other internal injuries.

One definite plus of this whole experience was a recalculation of my own personal pain thresholds. Y’know, the whole “on a scale of 1-10, where is your pain right now? It hadn’t been properly calibrated in a while and I was soon provided a great opportunity. As they tried to transfer me onto the table for the CT scan, it became apparent that after spending several hours in a seated or propped up position, everything in my neck and upper back had locked up to the point where getting me to a fully lying flat position felt almost impossible. While sitting or lying still I was more or less okay, but the instant I tried to move or tilt my upper body in any direction, pain radiated out from my neck like a series of cascading explosions. If a “10” on my Personal Pain Threshold is screaming at full volume, forcing my body to stretch out into a supine position took me to about a 9.6. Thankfully, doctors don’t seem to mind you screaming in their face as long as you apologize very sincerely once you can breathe again, so I don’t think there are any hard feelings on his part.

The CT scan showed fractures in the C1, C2, and C7 vertebrae of my neck. From my lying position I never did get to see the images (note to self - request those at next follow up visit to the doctor). The decision was quickly made to transfer me to the larger and better-equipped Greenville Memorial hospital downtown, so a nice dose of fentanyl later I finally checked off the bucket list item of getting to ride in an ambulance (no siren though, how sad). At Greenville we repeated much of the ER experience from Greer. I fully codified my story in repeating it to several doctors, basic neurological tests, more CT scans. A few hours passed here and finally I was moved to a regular room.

That evening I met Dr. Lynn, the neurosurgeon who would handle my case. We immediately got along well and he was able to make clear the situation and spell out the options. Your C1 and C2 vertebrae are at the top of the stack of the spinal column in your neck and function as the pivot joint that allows you to have side-to-side rotational movement of your head. Based on the level of fractures, we had two options. Option 1 was fusion surgery, where they would go in and fix all the broken parts of my neck with rods and screws - this would be, all things considered, a pretty standard procedure and would no doubt fix everything, with the unfortunate side effect of causing a 50% permanent loss of that rotational movement for the rest of my life. Option 2 was a Halo Brace, which by locking my head/neck/torso in place would cause the next 4-6 months of life to be very interestingly awkward - but, if all went well - would allow my neck bones to heal naturally, restoring full mobility and strength to the area just like any other broken bone in the body.

It was a pretty easy decision. Dr. Lynn said that were he in my shoes, based on lifestyle and age factors - he would opt for the Halo. The challenge of living with the difficulty of the brace for six months seemed to me to be a pretty solid trade off in order to be able to regain full use of my neck. And worse case scenario - if something with the Halo went wrong - we could always perform surgery at that point. Once you go the surgical route, there’s no undoing it though - so it seemed wise to keep that as a last resort. Late that night they took me for some MRIs, and the next morning we decided officially to opt for the Halo.

Hospitals are never the most entertaining places - and when you’re locked in place, on your back, in a neck brace, basically unable to move except for your arms - they get really boring, really fast. Time slowed to a crawl that first night - my pain wasn’t overwhelming, thanks to the regular doses of oxycontin they plied me with every four hours, but the discomfort was at a serious level. Sleep was fitful when I was able to doze off, and the twinges of pain, post-nasal-drip, and deep body fatigue that had finally set in kept me in a constant twilight of malaise. Thankfully, while she couldn’t spend the night due to Covid-related restrictions on visiting hours, Lindsay had managed to procure and send me up a phone charger cable so I had a lifeline to the outside world.

Tuesday was a long day of waiting and watching the hours tick by unendingly slowly. The Halo procedure was scheduled for Wednesday morning, so there was nothing to do Tuesday but lie and wait. I’ve never been very claustrophobic, but I soon discovered that being locked in place on your back in a neck brace can get real old, real fast. Time passed slowly, Lindsay was able to visit in the afternoon, the meds came on schedule, I sipped half an Ensure as the only food I could really get down, and soon night came again. A Harry Potter marathon on TV got me through the night, as I dozed on-again, off-again to the sounds of Order of the Phoenix and The Half Blood Prince.

Finally Wednesday dawned - Halo Day. At 9am I was wheeled down to pre-op, and by 10:30 they wheeled me back. The one other time of my life I had been put under anesthesia was for sinus surgery 15+ years ago, and let me tell you what, those professional anesthesiologists know what they are doing. Just like that procedure, I remember being wheeled into the operating room, being lifted onto the table, and then BOOM, out went the lights. In what felt like mere moments, the lights were back on and I was slowly swimming out of the post-op daze. By about 2pm I was taken to my new hospital room and the rest of the day passed in a daze of dozing and attempting to get used to this new sensation of being encased in this new contraption.

Easily one of the best things about being fitted with the Halo was that I was soon after allowed to have control of my own hospital bed - so I was able on Thursday to start adjusting my bed slightly up and down to give some variance of position. My pain and discomfort floated pretty regularly between a 3-7 on my 10 point scale depending on how far away I was from the next pain med allocation. I finally was able to get some food down - institutionalized eggs and grits never tasted so good as they did that Thursday morning. One side effect was an excess of jaw stiffness and tension, so eating was still pretty difficult - and I could still really only recline my hospital bed up so far - but it was progress in the right direction, and progress was what I was most eager for.

The timeframe for when I would get to go home was in flux and largely related to how soon I showed progress in getting up and moving around - the doctor wanted me mobile before he released me from the hospital. Thursday late in the morning the physical therapists came by for the first time. It occurred to me that I had not even done so much as sit up for 3+ days by this point, so I was more than a little anxious to see how much I could move. The short answer was - “not a lot”. Turns out that three days lying on your back, then adding a twelve pound weight to your upper body really messes with all levels of your equilibrium. We were able to get me to a sitting position (achieved in the Halo by rolling onto your side and then levering up into a sitting position, since the brace effectively removes your ability to twist, bend, or rotate your torso), which I found to be absolutely exhausting. We sat for a minute, then slowly got me up and into a standing position. Never in my life has standing up been so difficult and felt like such an achievement. The twelve pound Halo felt like a two hundred pound weight sitting on my head, and I was able to stand for roughly 60 seconds, sweat dripping down my face with the effort, until I started to feel lightheaded and my vision started to swim, at which point we eased me back down onto the bed and the therapists hailed a job well done for a first day. Personally I was more than a little disheartened - it felt pretty defeating to have to take such baby steps to build physical strength back - but I resolved to take it one day at a time and just look for incremental progress.

Also on Thursday my Orthotist, Todd - responsible for the Halo brace device itself - came by to tighten the screws. Yes, it was vital that the day after the brace was placed, he do a quick tightening of the screws bolted into my skull at four points to ensure they were maintaining the proper torque and tension. Honestly, it sounds a lot worse than it was. The screws didn’t so much hurt (there’s not really a lot of nerves there in the thin skin around your skull), as much as they just created the sensation of “tightness” around your head. More on that later. Todd prided himself on being so skilled with the torque wrench required to tighten the screws that he could adjust them to the proper 7-8 pounds of pressure purely on feel alone. I was impressed and trusted him completely (although really, what else are you going to do with the man screwing bolts into your skull?)

The rest of Thursday passed without much note. Hospital food tastes great when it’s all you have to eat, I watched Mission Impossible 3, and the NFL season kicked off that night and all these elements brought cheer into my life and kept my spirits up. On Friday I had 2 PT sessions and made terrific progress, being able to stand with more ease and even trudge slowly halfway down the hallway and back aided by a walker. The doctors said with this progress I’d be able to go home on the following day, and finally I had a clear path to getting out of the hospital and on to the next stages of recovery. That night I was able to find one of my favorite comedy films of all time, Tommy Boy, on TV to bolster my spirits, and even though it was a largely sleepless night due to general discomfort, Saturday soon dawned.

By 10:30am I was on my way - very, very slowly - out of the hospital. Easily the most difficult part was folding me into the car for the ride home - my mobility was still extremely limited at this point due to neck pain radiating out into my entire upper body, and the Halo brace poles extended up above my head on four points, so it required some pretty creative contorting to get me into the car. Once secured tho, we trundled on home and unpacked me the same way into the house.

It was good to be home. Getting out of the hospital and back into familiar territory provided a huge psychological boost back into the realm of “normalcy”, and while I knew recovery and finding the new “Halo Brace Normal” was going to be quite a journey - I was ready to take it, one step at a time.

Part Three - Adjusting to the Halo - The First Two Weeks

 

In the Greer ER

Halo Brace, Freshly Applied

Finally sitting up unassisted

Part One - The Accident

You know, right up until the moment I flipped off the edge of the road, it was a TERRIFIC weekend.

Labor Day, 2020. Perfect weather and a couple of free mornings meant it was lining up to be a great weekend for cycling. Two days before, on Saturday, I had done a 125 mile ride on flatter roads (as flat as roads can get in the upstate of South Carolina) down towards Anderson. After a rest day on Sunday, it was time to do some climbing on Monday.

I love climbing hills on my bike. I’m nowhere close to setting any King of the Mountain records on Strava, but for whatever reason, I just love getting on a steep incline that stretches out for a few miles in front of me and just grinding it out. 9/7/20 was the day to finally go tackle the climb up to Sassafras Mountain, the highest point in South Carolina. The first section of road getting out there isn’t bad - a pretty gentle 7 mile uphill section on Hwy 178 - but then it turns into a much steeper uphill for 5 miles to reach the summit of Sassafras. Some sections on that climb were an absolutely brutal 15-20% gradient that forced me to squeeze every ounce of power out of my legs to keep the bike upright and moving forward. But slowly and surely, I knocked out each section and finally reached the top. Hands down it was the hardest piece of cycling I’ve ever done, and boy was it a fantastic feeling of achievement knowing that I had conquered that climb and now the rest of the ride was alllll downhill.

I’m not one to bomb the descents when I’m cycling. I’m actually not that much of a daredevil, and I tend to ride the brakes pretty hard. They don’t freak me out, but I have a healthy respect for the fact that no matter how good your tires or your handling/cornering skills are, there’s only ever a few square inches of rubber tire connecting you and the road at any moment, and there’s a lot that can happen to upset that precarious connection.

So, downhill we went. A short ways down the descent I turned onto a side road that would lead me up into NC and around a long circuitous route that would eventually meander back towards home. Gladys Fork Road. I actually only knew about and was riding this road because a friend of mine had done a similar route a few days before and I had noticed he used this connector road leading from Sassafras.

Less than two miles down Gladys Fork, a curve approached. I saw it coming clearly - the road leading up to it was downhill but straight. It was a pretty sharp curve, no other cars were coming, so I made sure I was on a good line at a reasonable speed and prepared to take the corner just like I had on a hundred other downhill descents.

And then I felt the skid.

I can think of few other heart-pounding, hair raising moments on a bike than when you feel your tires skid. I’ve never crashed before, but I’ve had a few times where on a (straight) downhill section I’ve squeezed the brakes a little too hard or hit some loose gravel and felt that wobbly, loss of control for a few microseconds before the tires found their grip again. The only thing I can reasonably compare it to is that feeling in the tiniest of intervals between when you know the car you’re in is about to hit / be hit by something, and the moment of actual impact. Adrenaline surges, time seems to dilate, and your vision and focus narrow on this singular moment of time in which nothing else but survival matters.

As best I can tell, a patch of loose gravel or sand was the culprit. My front tire went into a skid and I instantly lost the ability to steer with any traction. I remember everything, moment-by-moment, with perfect clarity (a positive? side effect of not blacking out or getting a concussion through the process) - not able to steer into the rest of the curve, my momentum carried me straight forward and off the edge of the road. There was no guardrail, and thick enough tree/foliage cover where I couldn’t see anything about where I was headed. But it happened so quickly that soon there wasn’t time to feel anything.

The primary memory I have of the moment of impact itself, oddly enough, is colors. Black and Green. My eyes must have closed involuntarily at some point. And the last thing I must have seen was the trees and brush I was hurtling towards - so I remember colors. Black and Green. And the sensation of flipping, of tumbling - not rolling or falling - but of sort of somersaulting forwards and down. I was shouting something incomprehensible (does adrenaline take over your vocal cords in such a moment as well?) I’m sure it happened in the flash of an eye, in my memory it stretches for a few seconds, before finally realizing I was motionless. But the key part - I realized I was motionless. I could still sense something. This must mean I was alive.

It was just like booting a computer up from a powered off state - or maybe just hitting the “restart” command. As best as I can tell I never lost consciousness, as there are no gaps in my memory, but there was a definite moment where, as I lay without moving, my brain started into a “boot-up and diagnostic mode”. First things first - I was alive. I was conscious, I was breathing, I was present. A quick prayer of thanks flashed through my mind. Then I opened my eyes to try to get my bearings.

The edge of the road dropped off sharply into about a ten foot deep ravine, leading down from the road to a small creek at the bottom. I had apparently flipped end over end at least once, perhaps a couple times, and come to rest at the bottom of the ravine - sitting in an almost upright position - with my feet resting in the creek. “What an absurdly comfortable position to come to rest in”, I recall thinking briefly. As I opened my eyes, my first thought was to notice my right arm draped over my stomach - while simultaneously noting that I could feel nothing in that arm from my shoulder down. “Broken arm”, I thought instantly. “I can’t feel my right arm at all - I must have broken it when I landed. Maybe my shoulder?”. Apart from a few immediate bumps and scrapes, I wasn’t gushing blood from anywhere that I could see - okay, that’s good - I didn’t impale myself on a tree branch or anything. I sat there for a few - seconds, minutes? Time was hazy at this point - but soon I realized I was starting to regain feeling in my right arm. A few moments later, I realized I could move it and that it didn’t appear to be in any severe pain - “Okay, so perhaps not a broken arm - maybe I just landed on it oddly and did something to lose feeling in it”. Another minute or so and it was feeling just as good as my left - as good as could be after a plunge into a ravine off a bike at speed, I suppose.

My helmet was still on - slightly askew, but still fully buckled. I found the clasp and managed to unbuckle and remove it. I could tell it was cracked, but it wouldn’t be til much later when I would see just how solidly through the helmet had cracked, split - and undoubtedly saved my life.

It was somewhere around this point when I first made a full body move by sitting up and looking around - and instantly felt a bolt of pain in my neck. “Ahhhh hmmm okay there’s something definitely wrong there”, I thought. As I slowly gathered myself to stand up and widen the scope of my bearings, I felt that pain return a couple times - along with a couple moments of a clicking, grinding sensation in my neck. “Alright then, let’s just do everything we can to not move the neck,” was my thought, and so I began to stiffly move around to see what my next steps were.

My bike was halfway down the ravine a few feet above me. It looked intact, but I only momentarily considered trying to get it out of the brush it was lodged in - too much movement for that. The slope was steep enough where from my vantage point, I could actually hear a couple cars going by, but could only barely see the very tops of them passing by - no one would be able to see me or my bike where we currently were. Getting out, and back up to the road, was the only next logical step.

My phone - where was my phone? I carry my phone in one of the back pockets of my cycling jersey, but as I reached back around, I realized it was no longer there. This cued a stiffly frantic couple minutes or so of searching to try and find it - and what a relief to discover it had been thrown free of my pocket but was clearly visible sitting on a rock halfway up to the road.

I calculated my path back up. There were some large rocks/boulders in a sort of a giant step down pattern up from the bottom of the ravine where I was, so moving as cautiously and carefully as possible, I half climbed/half crawled from one rock to the next moving upwards - grabbing my phone as I passed by, and using small branches and brush to try to brace myself as I moved upward - all while trying to move my neck and head as little as possible.

I crested the edge and made it back onto the road. I realized I had left my helmet back down at the bottom, along with my bike - but sure enough, unless you really knew where to look, there was no way anyone was going to stumble on this accident site. I pulled out my phone - naturally, I had no service on this road in the Middle of The Edge of Nowhere, NC. “But remember,” I told myself, recalling hiking/camping trips with no cell service in the foothills of the Carolinas, “your phone GPS works even when you don’t have cell service”. I pulled up Google Maps, waited for GPS to lock onto my location, and dropped a pin where I was standing - that way I’d be able to find my way back here someday. That done - and with no cell service still - I started trudging down the road.

I knew I wasn’t that far from civilization - and I had heard at least 2 cars go by while I was in the ditch - so I wasn’t terribly concerned about being stranded out in the middle of nowhere. While my neck was certainly jacked up, and I could feel the general soreness of having taken such a tumble setting in, I was still fully mobile, so I was reasonably confident that if I had to walk a bit to find cell service or hitch a ride I could do so. Sure enough - it wasn’t more than a couple minutes but a car came down the road towards me.

At that moment, I needed a Good Samaritan. As it turns out, I got a Good Better Best Samaritan. Kaegan rolled up, the chillest dude I could have imagined, who seemed remarkably unphased at finding a bedraggled, bleeding, stiffly-moving, cycle-less cyclist in the middle of the road, forlornly waving an arm in an attempt to appear pathetic (and harmless) enough to earn a ride into town. He cleared off his passenger seat for me, chucking his bag into the backseat where his dog Gracie resided, and I folded myself gently into the car, explaining what happened. He said it was no problem to take me into the nearest town while I figured out the best course of action.

Look, in hindsight, yes, I probably should have called an ambulance. But that’s 20/20 in the rearview mirror - at the time I didn’t KNOW my neck was broken. All I knew is that something back there was a mess, I had full feeling and mobility in the rest of my body, and I had some nice cuts and scrapes. Who knows exactly where my threshold for calling for professional help was - if I’d had another broken bone or two? If I didn’t have feeling in one or more of my extremities? I felt at the time - and still do now - that I was thinking clearly - if I had survived ten minutes of climbing out of the ditch, surely I was fine to get a ride back to home turf and a local hospital. It made sense at the time. It still does. But yes, okay, next time I break my neck, I will call an ambulance on site. Promise.

Kaegan let me call my wife, Lindsay, from his cell phone, which had service, and we drove gently into the nearby town of Rosman. Very, very gently - I found pretty quick that going around curves or any rapid acceleration or braking overrode my ability to keep a totally still neck - any shift in movement was causing bolts of pain to fire up into my skull. We rolled into town and pulled up to a gas station where Kaegan ran inside to get me some water and ibuprofen. It took a little over an hour for Lindsay to make the drive up to Rosman to get me, and Kaegan volunteered to sit there in the car with me and wait for her. Like I said - the Best Samaritan. Sitting perfectly still in a motionless car felt pretty good actually, so we sat for an hour and swapped the Sparks Notes of our life stories with each other. He let slip that he was a minor star on TikTok - I promised to try to give him all the free advertising I could in return for his good deed - so if TikTok is still around when you’re reading this, make sure to go check out his profile @kaegandalton.

Having broken most land speed records between our house and Rosman, NC, Lindsay finally rolled into the parking lot where we were waiting. The stiffness and soreness had definitely begun to set in by this point, but we were able to very gingerly get me transferred from Kaegan’s car over to Lindsay’s. We thanked Kaegan again, profusely, and then started the drive back down the mountain. That was, to put it mildly, a long, long drive. We had to take it super slow so I could try to brace myself and not cause too much pain, but after an only mildly agonizing hour and a half or so, we had finally made it back to our hometown, and made a beeline for Greer Memorial Hospital.

This whole time we drove, although I was bracing against the pain, my natural optimism kicked in and my spirits were still pretty high. I detailed everything that had happened to Lindsay, we gave profuse thanks that I was still alive, and we pondered what the next steps would be. I knew we’d be in good hands at the hospital, and so can honestly say that there was little to no panic, fear, or worry in my head or heart as we got near. We pulled up to the front door at the Emergency Entrance of the hospital, and a nurse and a security guy came out to meet us. I had rolled down the window, and one of them asked me what was wrong.

“Well, I had a bit of a cycling accident and I seem to have jacked up my neck pretty good!”, I said, rather cheerily.

As the word “neck” left my mouth, the nurse’s demeanor instantly changed.

“DON’T. MOVE.” she shouted, as she sprinted back inside and came back moments later with a neck brace. “We need to get this on you before anything else happens”, she said with a piercing intensity that cut through my optimistic sheen.

It was at that moment I began to suspect that perhaps my injury was slightly more severe than I had previously thought.

Part Two: The Hospital

The ditch where I ended up. The road is offscreen
to the upper right. The creek where I came to rest 
along the let side 

My helmet undoubtedly saved 
the day and my life