Ice Ice Baby

Breaking news – ice is dangerous!

I think I got hit with some kind of karmic suggestion power. I was out Tuesday morning finishing up the driveway and I get a call from a colleague. She’s going in for an interview and wanted to know if she could use me as a reference. I said that wasn’t a problem and we somehow got on the subject of what I was doing. When I said I was shoveling the driveway, her response was “Don’t fall”.

This might have been in reference to a major sleet storm we had several years back when I was attempting to chip out the driveway and ending up sliding down the hill a little bit. In that case, the only thing damaged was my pride. Still, I’ve navigated my driveway many times since then and have managed to stay upright.

Well I get back from my lesson on Tuesday and I realize I had not yet picked up the trash can.

Now it was dark and it was cold. I had cleared the driveway but there are always pockets where snow melts and freezes so I was very careful in walking down to where the bin was. Got all the way down to the bottom of the driveway and for some reason, I was thinking back to that “Don’t Fall” comment and, naturally, I hit a patch of ice and pitched face first onto the concrete.

Hit my forehead a little above my right eye. Saw some bright lights when my head made contact with the pavement. Then, for some reason, I remembered all the times I’ve read about how much head wounds tend to bleed and, sure enough, this one was doing that as well. In the light of day, the end of my driveway now looks like a crime scene.

But, I think I have Mom’s gene for just “toughing it out”. So I slapped something on my head and got up and rolled that bin back up the driveway. I mean I wasn’t about to leave it down there after the price I paid to get it. Then, gathered all my stuff out the car and made my dramatic entrance.

We had the discussion about going to the ER vs just trying to patch it up at home. I was in the “patch it up” but lost out. Of course, I drove myself to the urgent care/ER that was still open (my wife came with me) and it did need stitches. She didn’t take advantage of the “I told you so” moment.

It certainly could have been a lot worse. If I had really done some damage and knocked myself out, I don’t know how long I would have been at the base of my driveway bleeding from my head. There have been no concussions symptoms so just a nice bump on the head and stitches.

Of course, I tried to break my fall with my hands and they are both scraped up. Left one is worse than the right one.

This presented a dilemma since I had a dance lesson last night. I mean we share a lot with our instructors but open hand wounds shouldn’t be on that list. I was going to cancel but I had a coaching lesson last night and there wouldn’t have been time for them to rope another student into that lesson. So I found a pair of thin gloves and wore those which required quite a bit of explaining. I can actually sort of hide the stitches under my hair so if it wasn’t for the hands, I could have gotten away without having to tell the story.

With the coaching lesson, the entire lesson was on getting into a proper frame. This was with my newer instructor who is going to start teaching me some standard and we had only worked on Quickstep for Showstoppers so that’s kind of what did. Basically, it was dance a bit, stop, get told that I lost my frame, go back to the beginning, get back into frame and repeat on and on and on.

My one big takeaway was that she wanted my chin down but my head back. I’ve heard “head back” so many times and I’ve been attempting to train myself to look out beyond my partner to keep from looking down. But I guess the thing that matters is the back of the neck and that needs to be straight. So the chin down kind of stretches that part of you.

Basically, the other part was to stretch my elbows as far as I thought I could and then go even farther. That and pulling the shoulders back (not down and back, just back!!) And bringing other parts up and straight and stretching everything. It felt shall we say awkward. Which is probably why my body kept rejecting it and trying to get to a more comfortable position.

And there was talk of energy through the elbows. And there was talk about engaging the lats differently because if you do what I had been taught, it restricts your breathing.

At the end, when my head was exploding and I was trying to figure out how to get energy to my elbows, she did say that she wouldn’t have gone into this if she didn’t think I could handle it. And that it would be a process. So we’ll see how it goes.