This isn’t really a medical update, but it’s been a while and I didn’t feel like waiting until Monday, so here we go.
I have another wound care doctor visit Monday. I’ll do an update on that around noon. With a lot of luck it’ll be “looks good. Take that thing off, mail it back, and go back to work the day after Labor Day.” Stacie, the nurses, and I all have our doubts, but the nurses have all said the hole is shrinking, looks good, and it’s got good circulation. So who knows.
Regardless of what he says, and regardless of whether I go back to work when we’re all hoping or it gets extended out even further, this injury has and will continue to screw with my life for some time. Nobody expects it to be completely closed, much less fully healed any time soon. I have serious doubts about it being closed enough to take a shower without wrapping it in watertight plastic before the Event.
Even after it fully heals, there are a lot of things I probably shouldn’t do anymore.
Hunting is probably off the table for a while. It just isn’t a great idea to be wandering around the woods way off the beaten path when something going wrong amounts to doing it all again plus a medevac flight. And on a less grim note, meat is cheap and we know plenty of people who deer hunt so it isn’t like we don’t have plenty of access to it. Plus I like hiking just fine without carrying fifty pounds of rifle and assorted gear in woods full of drunk, trigger-happy idiots; I know far too many people who think “going hunting” necessarily involves getting hammered.
As for hiking, Minnesota has a top-notch park system. I have two nice park reserves within easy driving distance, one near home, one near work. Plus other nice parks including the Coon Rapids Dam and the one over by Home Depot, all with walking trails.
We also have that resort membership. For about the cost of a hunting trip, we can spend a week in a cabin in the woods. Just the two of us and anyone we decide to bring along, we can sleep in all we want, and there’s plenty of stuff to do out there. And there’s absolutely no pressure to make sure we fill our tags.
Stacie and I are both project managers. When we go out to the cabin, we have a prioritized list of objectives before we leave the house. Go to certain places to get certain things. Go do certain things. Eat out at X, Y, and Z. Go see whatever. Get a certain amount of work done for Rock Solid Mamas and Devil Monkey Games. Spend X amount of time on whatever. Most of that list is straight-up wasting time just screwing around or driving all over the place.
And that’s gorram awesome.
The resort we go to is within walking distance of the St. Croix River, and we usually end up at a couple of lakefront or riverside parks in our wanderings. I hear the fishing around that neck of the woods is pretty good. Maybe I’ll take that up once I dare get my feet anywhere near dirty water again. A good rod & reel combo is a hundred or two hundred dollars. A really spiffy tackle box is another fifty or so, a hundred if you want to go absolutely nuts. Eyeballing it, I’ll bet I could assemble a solid shore-fishing starter rig for five hundred tops.
Assuming my foot cooperates and I decide this is a worthy task, next summer I’ll be parking my carcass on a fancy lawn chair next to a lake or river, maybe soaking my feet in the water, drinking some of Tommy’s finest and reeling in my and Stacie’s lunch.
Or not. Plenty of nice little restaurants up there too.