And another Dad bites the dust!

normal_BrokenBicycle.jpg, originally uploaded by macslost.

Besides basic genetics, I inherited a few things from my parents.

From Mom, I got the packratting. I have a hard time throwing anything away. If you know me, you know I have more crap than God.

Dad's a fairly handy guy when it comes to building/fixing things, which I picked up, but he also is damage prone (thanks a bunch for THAT one). The man has had 5 major bike spills in the last decade or so. Like me, he is right-handed. Unlike me, he always lands on his ride side and I tuck and let the left side take the hit. Hey, I need my right hand. The left is pretty useless except for Guitar Hero fret buttons, secondary weapon fire and tying shoes. And I could do a whole 10-page blog entry of all of my accidents over the years, but I won't. Not now, anyway.

So this morning my Dad took a pretty severe spill off his bike while zooming down Old San Marcos in Santa Barbara. It's a rather brutal windy road and he hit a rock when his brakes were acting up (it wasn't the brakes per se, more that he was LOOKING at his brakes when he hit the rock).

He landed on his back on a bigger rock, breaking 9 ribs in his back, 5 in his side, puncturing the lung-liner (not exactly sure what the phrase is, but the wall AROUND the lung filled with blood, NOT the actual lung), and broke his clavicle (collar bone) in 4 places.

So we ran up from LA and sat around the hospital all day (blog time!). He's fine and should be out of ICU tomorrow. He can use his hands fine and is doped up to the gills.

You might think I'm being cavalier about this, and to an extent, maybe I am, but after spending a day in the hospital around the doctors/nurses and after it happening both to me and him on multiple occasions, it gets to be a little old hat. When my mom got the call this morning, she actually just sighed, rolled her eyes and threw some clothes into a bag and went to pick him up because last time he bit it and the firemen called, he was just scraped up. I love my Dad immensely, so of course we dropped everything we were doing and drove right up, but I only panicked for about the first 30 seconds after reading the text message that he was in the hospital. After I saw what happened, I just sighed and rolled my eyes.

2 times ago, he bit it, laid around the house all weekend gritting his teeth and finally went to the hospital and he had broken the ball-joint off the top of his humerus (upper arm bone). Yeah, sat around the house eating aspirin with his arm snapped in half. So he's not that much of a whiner.

Anyway, tomorrow we'll head back to LA, since we'll be back NEXT Friday for the birth of my first actual blood nephew and my parents' first grandchild. But that's another blog entry. Actually, the worst thing about the accident is that my Dad is a notorious baby-hog, so holding the baby is going to be a difficult task for him. For that, I feel bad.

Oh, and that's NOT a picture of my dad's bike. His bike is some hard-core mountain bike that's in way better shape than he is.