a Life of Brian

3 days before we left for Hawaii I hurt my hip playing in our weekly Saturday morning basketball game. I jumped with someone and when our legs got tangled up I came crashing down to the cement floor onto the backside of my hip.

I was able to finish playing, but I had lost any hope of being very effective for the rest of the day. The pain increased and by the end of the day I was having trouble sitting comfortably and walking up stairs.

It’s sort of hard to describe the location of the injury. There are two points that stick out the furthest on your hip. The top of your pelvis (known as the hip pointer) and then a few inches below where your femur sticks out opposite of your hip joint. The back side of this point on the femur was where I came down on my left side. It sucked.

I spent the next two days taking it easy and icing it. I got the point that once I was standing I could walk with minimal discomfort, and once I was sitting I could find positions that were comfortable, but transitioning between the two was very painful. Stairs were also problematic, as was any other movement that push pressure on the outside of my hip. It’s hard to explain, but once I was standing I was able to walk (pretty much) normally because once my legs were underneath me, the weight is on the inside of the hips and through the inside of the leg bones. Anything that put pressure on the outside of that bone (lifting the leg for example) was problematic to say the least.

Anyway, things slowly got better over the next few days. The night of the accident I was pretty sure that I would need to go see a doctor before we left for Hawaii but the next morning it felt a whole lot better. In fact each subsequent morning it felt better and stronger. And luckily by the time our flight rolled around on Tuesday morning I was able to sit comfortably for long periods of time.

Throughout our week in Hawaii I found myself become less and less aware of the hip injury. Every once and a while I would move too fast or extend it outside of it’s most common range of motion and I would be reminded by brief moments of pain, but for the most part I was begining to forget about it. That was until yesterday… when I met a wave that didn’t like me.

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite things to do in Hawaii is body boarding. Well as per our usual schedule we were out in the surf by mid-afternoon yesterday. I had only gotten one or two runs at a good wave when I headed out to find another. On my way out I saw an unfortunate wave forming before me. It was swelling up to about six feet tall and was about to crest when I saw that I was in “no man’s land. ” I had no where to run, I didn’t have enough time to either move deeper into the water to get through it before it collapsed, nor could I run towards shore, because it would have come down on top of me. I was screwed. But still, I had to make a choice, standing still wasn’t a good option so I tried to move out futher into the wave in a vain attempt to reduce the damage coming my way.

When the wave hit me it picked me up off my feet and turned my body parallel to the ground before slamming me down onto my left side. There is some abrasional evidence that my thigh hit the beach first, but I pretty much didn’t notice or remember much of anything that happened once hip met the sand.

It was bad.

I probably would have screamed, if I hadn’t have been pretty much under water at the time.

Long story short (too late) I’m now a little worse off than I was after last weeks injury. I’m now at about 24 hours since it happened and I’m starting walk normally again, but yet here I am again facing a long flight sitting on my injured ass tomorrow.

I’ve stayed out the water today, which means that I’ve slowly been going crazy today sitting here next to Stine in the sun while she reads her book and works on her tan. I’ve been doing what I can to keep myself busy: reading, snoozing, writing long blog posts ob my iphone using only my thumbs and index fingers. But I’d say that aside from the world of hurt I’m in for during my 7 hours of flying tomorrow, I’m ready to come home.

Stine is pushing hard for me to make a doctors appointment now so that I could see someone as soon as we get back, but really who wants to go the doctor for a broken hip on their 28th birthday. Talk about feeling old.

Besides, while Christine thinks I’m looking at a hairline fracture, I’m personally keeping my fingers crossed for a bone bruise!

We spent the whole day today in the ocean! We started off with a boat cruise out to Molekini for a snorkeling trip. The catamaran pulled up to onto the beach at around 9 am took us out to the volcanic crater a few miles off the Maui coast. We snorkled in the water for about an hour before heading off to another snorkeling spot known as “Turtle Town.” Guess what we saw there?

After Turtle Town the boat took it’s time making it’s way back to shore. We had lunch and a few drinks, all the while stopping along the way to watch the humpback whales when they would pass near.

We got back to the hotel shortly after 1 and both decided it was time for a nap. I’d had more than enough sun for the day so I opted for a snooze in the room while Christine went in search of more sun poolside.

In the late afternoon we headed back our to the beach with our body-boards and spent the waning hours playing in the waves! While snorkeling is pretty much Stines favorite thing, I enjoy bodyboarding the most.

We are now winding down for another pleasant evening. Sunset is in about an hour, and then it’s off to find dinner. No plans for that yet, but we have been thinking about ice cream in the hot tub for dessert.

She made it a record 38 hours without checking her work email.

That’s about 37 and a half hours longer than the previous record.

Records have been the talk of the town here in Hawaii as well.

http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=11931183

They are kind of silly here sometimes.

After a long day of travelling yesterday we slept something close to 11 hours last night. It was awesome!

This morning we drove up to ‘Ioa State Park and then spent the afternoon in Lahaina. Lahaina is a bit of a tourist trap and feels like a warm tropical Westport. It’s great for people who like touristy and quaint little shops, or for people like Stine who like to shop for jewelry while on vacation. I am not one of those people.

The ‘Ioa Valley on the otherhand was very pretty. It features the ?ao Needle, a “lava remnant” which rises 1200+ feet up from the valley floor (pictured below). Acording to the signage at the end of the trail it’s known historically was “the stone phallus of Kona, the Hawaiian god of the ocean. ” So we took a few inappropriate forced perspective pictures and headed out.

On our way out of the valley we stopped at one of the botanical gardens and walked around for about for a little bit while Christine took a few hundred pictures of pretty flowers… she would make her father proud!

Tonight we are headed back to Wailiea for a nice dinner followed by our standard Hawaiian evening of drinks in the hot tub.

Tomorrow we have no agenda for the day so I imagine we’ll spend the bulk of our day swimming in the ocean and lounging on the beach. It’s a tough job … but I think we can handle it.

Yes. Yes we would.

This morning we are on our way to Hawaii for a week! Its about 5:00 now and we are already at the airport waiting for our flight to board (Christine was so excited she even woke up 30 minutes early this morning at around 3:00 am).

The cab picked us around 4 after a long emotional goodbye to the pets (I wish I was joking), but they will be in good hands with Eric while we are gone

A pretty uneventful morning until we had our first run-in with airport security! We brought 3 small bags with us for the week and are carrying all of them onto the plane with us. 2 of them got through no problem, one of them did not. The first time they asked to run it through the scanner again I just thought they must have seen it from a funny angle on the first pass and that they just wanted to take another look. But after they ran it through a third time I knew that we were going to be there for awhile.

By the time they had emptied our bag and were trying to feel inside the lining it was pretty clear that they were looking for something specific. She then preceeded to systematically check and refold every article of clothing before kindly returning it to the bag. Stine is an expert packer, but I do have to give the TSA credit since everything fits much better into our bag now.

Eventually she found what she was looking for. During the five or so minutes that she was searching I figured that we had some liquid or small thing of sunscreen which had escaped it’s protective ziplock baggie, but no, as it turns out Christine had packed for me the pants which I
wore earlier in the week while helping my dad to replace the carpet in the den. So Dad, if you’re reading this I’m sorry, but Government Officials have confinscated your pocket knife.

So yeah. I’m “that guy.”

Anyway, we are now on our way after a small delay, the embarrasment soon to erased by free drinks in First Class (thanks for upgrade Don!). We’ll be in Hawaii in just under 9 hours with a brief stop in San Francisco.

I just hope we don’t have to go through another security that again … after all, it is Groundhog’s Day.