Recovery time in Tasmania

Hey again, it has been a couple of weeks since my last post. I’ve done a lot and I figured it was about time to set up an update.
First of all, the injury that I had while I was surfing in Sydney turned out to be what I suspected, a ruptured distal bicep. Two Tuesdays ago, the 17th of June, I had surgery to repair the injury. The procedure was to make about a 3 or 4 inch long “Z” shaped cut on the inside of my elbow, peel the skin back, grab the end of the tendon and then pull it back down to attach it further back down the arm to the bone. Originally the orthopedic planned on using a couple screws with braided monofilament attached to one end to attach the tendon back to the bone. But when he got in there he said he just decided to attach it by drilling holes in the bone then lacing the braided monofilament through the hole and through the tendon. He said that he didn’t need to use the screws because he said I had very strong bones, making the screws unnecessary. I spent the night and the next morning in the hospital hooked up to an IV full of morphine. I was in a good deal of pain and couldn’t even move my fingers for a while, but I made good use of my little morphine remote control they gave me. When I left the hospital they supplied me with a good amount of painkillers to keep me comfortably numb. Apparently it is a really uncommon injury and it was just terrible luck (worse than 1 in 100,000) that it would happen to me.
When I was diagnosed, a couple of days before the surgery, my mom decided to fly over here to help me get through the surgery and the initial recovery process. She has been staying over at our place in the extra room for the past week and a half and is leaving in a couple of days. She helped take care of me with Andrew and made sure that all the insurance and hospital things worked out.
During my initial recovery and time off from work, we went to Tasmania for about 5 days. Andrew, my mom, and I had a great time touring the island of Tasmania. We went hiking, saw scenic lookouts, went out in Hobart (the capitol), and did lots of other touristy things. My favorite part I think was the hike we did to Shipstern’s Bluff. It is a recently made famous big-surf spot on the south coast of Tasmania. It was a beautiful several hour hike and it was really cool to see some swell crashing on the rocks at the surf spot. The conditions weren’t good enough to surf but when the waves hit the rocks the water would spray up really high, about 40 feet up! The rock formations and other wildlife in the area was really cool too.
Another fun thing we did in Tasmania was go to Bonorong Zoo. The kangaroos were free roaming in the zoo area and you could feed them and pet them and stuff. Other animals that we saw were wombats, wallabies, Tasmanian devils, tiger cat, emus, wedge tailed eagle, koala bears, sugar gliders, and other marsupials. We got to hold and pat a koala and a wombat as well. Wombats by the way are awesome, if you get a chance you should learn about them and their defense mechanisms. It kind of sucked only being able to use my left hand and having a really sore arm immobilized in a cast and sling, but I had plenty of painkillers to help me along.
Since then I: have been back at work and only move a bit slower then normal with limited use of my right arm. The research is coming along pretty well and I am starting to get some pretty good and consistent results from my lab experiments.
The worst thing though about being injured is that I won’t be able to surf again while I am over here. I think about it a lot and it really sucks because that was pretty much what I planned this trip around, other than the funding by NCSU to do the research. Now that I can’t surf I have been doing and looking for other things to do with my time off work.. I have been doing a lot of surf photography and actually had time to go out to the bars and things and meet other people who live in the area. I would rather be surfing but there are plenty of other ways to have a good time out here. Australia definitely is amazing and has a lot of other awesome things to offer that you can’t do anywhere else. This morning though it really hurt to look at the double overhead perfect waves with no one on them. All I could do is take photos of the waves and watch Andrew paddle out to perfect shaped waves. The waves really were some of the best waves I have ever seen and there was practically no one out surfing them.
This past couple of days I met up with my friend Angela from Hawaii. We both stayed in the same building when I went to school out there and were good friends. She has been doing an international student exchange over here at Deakin University. It’s a crazy random chance that we both ended up at the exact same place at the same time almost 2 years since I lived down the hall from her in Hawaii. We went out a couple times over the past week and I got to meet a bunch of her friends from the area and party it up with them. I met a bunch of cool people, the only bad thing is that a lot of them are international students who are going back home within the next week now that the semester is just ending. I met a couple of Aussies from the area though and some people that are staying around so that should be good.
Tomorrow Daniel, Mellissa, Andrew, Mom, and I are doing a full day trip down the Great Ocean Road. We have some sweet plans for what to do and where to stop and it will be nice to have a look at some of the massive swell further down the coast. The waves usually get exponentially larger the further west you go down the coast.
Later!
Daniel

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