Forced March

There is no getting around the fact that March 2025 was not a good month.

I’d been dreading it anyway, since no one looks forward to turning 60—apart from those who have reason to fear they may not—but as things turned out my pessimism was wildly optimistic.

The month started nicely enough. There was still a chill in the air, but over the weekend of March 1st and 2nd I managed my annual beat down of the apple tree.

I hope you noticed all the little early spring flowers budding in the background. I took closeups of them, but they’d bore you and waste our precious time together.

You probably also noticed in that last picture that the tree had not been completely pruned. I wasn’t giving it a mohawk: I just saw that I was running out of daylight and still needed time to pack up all the cuttings and get them to the dump. Plenty of time to finish it off next weekend, I told myself.

But for reasons I am still at a loss to explain, I exploded into action that Monday. While working from home, I also managed to do all the chores I normally spread out over the week and even managed to get the last of the tree taken care of before the sun went down.

How wonderful it felt to know I’d cleared my whole week in advance! It meant I could take it all at a leisurely pace.

Sigh.

On the morning of Tuesday, March 4th, at about 5:50 in the morning, I was biking through Hareskov, about 4 km into my 22 km commute to work. I could see a bump coming up in the road ahead of me, and slowed for it.

Doesn’t look like much, does it? (That picture was taken much later in the day: at 5:50 is was still dark out and the bump looked even less troublesome.)

Here are some closeups I took at that later time:

It still doesn’t look very intimidating, does it? The sort of thing designed to ease wheeled passage right over the cable it was protecting. I shouldn’t have had to slow down at all, and yet I did.

My bike did not like it, even at relatively slow speed. My bike took that bump about as gracefully as it would have taken a two-by-four. Or a brick. The bike jerked out of control. For a moment it felt as though I was going to have it back under control, but then I realized no, too late, it’s going into a leftward slide. I’m going to end up on the ground.

And I did.

And I thought, “Ow.”

And then I thought, “Damn, that hurt. This sucks. I’ll just bike back and work from home today after all.”

I tried to pick myself up and immediately realized I could not. My left arm was just no good. Whenever I tried to use them, my left shoulder and upper arm screamed in pain (so to speak). I simply couldn’t use them for anything.

Nevertheless, as Katherine Hepburn would say, I managed to get up, get on my bike, ride uphill the few hundred meters between myself and Hareskov Station. I managed to fish my wallet out of my back pocket, fish out my train card, check myself in, and get myself and my bike on the train. I managed to get off four minutes later at Værløse Station and actually carry my bike down the steps to the bike bath, and to ride the last kilometer home.

I did all that, and yet when I finally got home and off the bicycle, I realized I could not even lock it: that’s a two-handed exercise, and it was impossible.

I got into the house—it was about 6:15 at this point, and everyone was still asleep. I looked in the mirror and noticed what someone ought to have told me on the train, if only there had been anyone else on the train: the entire lower part of my face was covered in blood.

Well, I thought to myself very sensibly, I can’t wake Trine up looking like this, it’d shock her to hell and she’d overreact. I’ll clean myself up and have a cup of coffee and just try to calm myself down.

“Cleaning myself up” was very difficult with just one good arm. I had managed to slip my jacket off, but quickly realized I had no earthly way of changing my shirt or anything else. (I did not yet know my left knee was as bloody and scraped as my chin had been.)

I did manage to get myself cleaned up, however, then brewed some coffee to bide my time while I waited for Trine to wake up. There was no rush, as I saw it: Molli was at her Lucas’s and wouldn’t be back until about 8:00 anyway, so it wasn’t like there was anything for Trine to do anyway.

I don’t know if it was just the amount of time that had elapsed (it was by now probably around 6:40), or the coffee, or the fact of my simply having started to come out of shock, but it was only now, just under an hour after the accident itself, that I realized: something is very wrong with my arm. I should probably get to the ER. And quickly. We should probably call Molli to wake her and get her home.

So I walked gingerly into the bedroom.

“I think I might have broken my arm,” I said to Trine.

This is long enough already. The permanent record is important, but from here the particular details aren’t as important. Trine called 1813 for me and got me a time at Herlev hospital ER, Molli drove home early, Trine drove me to the hospital, I only had to wait about ten minutes to be x-rayed, and the doctor who’d been in the booth with the radiologists came out immediately and handed me two Tylenols, an ibuprofen—and some morphine.

The morphine was because he’d seen what I’d done to myself and already knew how he was going to have to treat it. Here’s what he’d seen:

The image on the left is how the bones of the shoulder should look when properly aligned (as they were after his treatment). The image on the right is what he’d seen on that first x-ray.

I had completely dislocated my left arm from the shoulder socket but people still don’t laugh when I describe the injury as very humerus.

I’d told my doctor right up front that although I was fluent in Danish, when it came to matters of my own health I preferred to speak my native American English to be sure I that I was saying precisely what I meant, nuance and all.

He laughed and said, “That’s great, I prefer English myself—I’m American, too!”

He reset my arm using the Noergaard technique (really Nørgaard), which is apparently the least traumatic way to reset a dislocated arm. Basically I stood about half a meter away from a wall, leaned into it with my head, and let my arms dangle by my side. Then for five minutes I rotated the left arm in small circles; after that he hung some weights from my left wrist and I continued another five or ten minutes until I was on the brink of exhaustion. He came over and began feeling my shoulder: it was unpleasant, but I thought “this is nothing, I have to brace for the Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon level pain when he snaps it violently back into place.”

Except after a moment he said, “There, it’s back.” And not long afterward I got another set of x-rays that provided the shot you saw above. It was indeed back.

Apparently the Nørgaard technique is to work the shoulder muscles so much that they become overused and weak, loosening enough to make resetting almost exponentially less traumatic and painful than any other method: and the technique had been developed by a Danish doctor right there at that very hospital.

Healing, however, was going to take a long time. Months. I should rest the shoulder for two weeks, keeping it in a sling the first week and then only sometimes in the sling after that, then I’d have a follow up visit, then assuming things still look good I should begin physical therapy, and after a month of that there’d be another evaluation.

But that was it: the trauma was over and it was just a question of recovery. Trine drove me home, I settled in front of the television on a morphine high.

Molli’s Lucas was there that night for dinner and I snuck this picture of them having dinner together. Such a cute couple!

As day became evening and then evening night, I was still floating along on the morphine, supplemented by analgesics and ibuprofen every 5-6 hours, and I stayed up late to take my mind off things by watching one of my favorite movies of all time.

Yes, the glorious nevertheless. . .

The next day was, no surprise, Wednesday, March 5th. I had taken a sick day but had no more morphine. The pain was rough, but at a friend’s recommendation I decided to use Resident Alien to get through it.

It was every bit as helpful as the morphine had been, and much funnier.

Trine came home from work that day complaining of stomach pains. Really bad. She went straight to bed.

It got worse and worse. She began vomiting and couldn’t stop, even when she ran out of stuff to vomit. She was in enormous pain. I was totally helpless: couldn’t drive, couldn’t really do much of anything. She’d called the non-emergency health services number and had been on hold for much too long. I was terrified so called 112 (the Danish 911). They spoke to Trine for a few minutes—through her vomiting—and said they were sending an ambulance. Half an hour later, quite possibly the longest half hour I’ve ever experienced, the ambulance arrived. They brought her to the hospital, where she was given a cursory exam and a diagnosis of bad stomach bug.

They actually sent her home that night.

I know we’re beyond the point of my being able to say “long story short” with a straight face, but just to keep things as brief as possible: this diagnosis was not just wrong but almost fatal. Trine’s appendix had burst. A simple scan would have shown that and allowed her to get the surgery she needed right away.

Instead what followed were almost four full days of her being advised by the non-emergency health line and even a Friday visit to her own doctor to be patient. Yes, it was clearly a bad bug, but these things could take time.

(Danish “free health care” in action.)

We should all thank God that Trine finally stopped believing them Sunday afternoon. Since Molli wasn’t around and I still couldn’t drive, Trine drove herself in her agony to the hospital. This time they scanned her, saw what had happened, and performed immediate emergency surgery to remove the dead appendix and its abcesses before sepsis kicked in and killed her—which it would have, we later learned, within about 12-24 hours.

Naturally there were complications because of how long they’d waited, so her inpatient stay lasted until the following Saturday evening. (She ended up having to be readmitted for another couple of days afterwards.)

She still needed another full week home from work to fully recover.

Meanwhile, we’ve skipped right past a lot of other stuff. Stuff that I have actual pictures of.

For example, as the weather finally turned to spring while Trine was hospitalized and I was working from home (I only took the days of and after the injury off from work, which turned out not to have been the right thing to do), the animals were having a great time.

Emma, who’d been a strictly indoor cat since her December trauma, even snuck out carefully one afternoon.

Meanwhile, Mormor and Jørgen were enjoying the fine spring weather.

I was sending Trine a lot of animal pictures because they seemed to cheer her up. For all her outdoor adventuring, Emma still spent most of her days on my pillow.

And Didi spent most of her days sprawled out on the floor, as usual.

Within a couple of days of her surgery Molli was able to drive us in for a visit.

She tweeted this photo out to the Danish family group with the text “wounded warriors.”

I was still working from home. Without Trine around, Emma started treating me as her substitute Trine, crawling up into my lap as I lay and watched television every evening.

By Wednesday the 12th I was actually able to drive—not comfortably, but passable—so because it was the last night prior to Maddie’s departure for Brussels on a cultural exchange program, we paid a visit. Mormor was visiting at the same time.

By early afternoon the next day, I could see Maddie wandering around Brussels on Life 360.

Here are the pictures she shared with us from her trip.

If you want details on what those pictures illustrate, you’ll have to ask her. All I know is they were mostly in Brussels, they got to see the EU Parliament (which is clearly in some of those pics), and they made a side trip to Ghent.

I was urged to come into the office on Friday the 14th because big festivities had been planned to celebrate my big round birthday.

I’m looking especially uptight in all of these pics: that’s because I was in considerable pain in all of them.

I’m not the happiest camper at work right now, but they really did treat me well—and gifted me with a pair of rechargeable heated gloves (for whenever I resume biking in cold weather), and a pair of Apple iPod Pro 2 earbuds.

My birthday itself, I woke up to an empty house. Trine still in hospital, Maddie in Belgium, and Molli at her Lucas’s. Molli did come home late that afternoon to make me moules frites for my birthday dinner, and, wonderfully, Trine managed to get discharged within moments of Molli getting to work in the kitchen.

(Not the best pictures, but they’re all I’ve got to show for my 60th birthday.)

The next day while I was walking Didi Trine sent me these pictures of a “walk” she was taking with Emma.

Another weird thing to emerge during this period: a sort of uneasy peace between Emma and Didi.

I took that picture because it’s the first and only one of the two of them in the same frame, looking relaxed. No arched backs, no perked ears, no suspicions or wariness of any kind. It’s like they could sense the household was out of balance and were leaning on each other for support.

With everything going on, I was grateful for my daily walks with Didi. The weather made them especially nice. By the end of the month I was even able to walk her in shorts. (I was in shorts. Didi went naked, as always.)

We really do live in a lovely spot.

Thus endeth March 2025.

Trine is just about back to where she was before her appendix burst.

I have less pain in my shoulder, but my upper left arm is still very limited in terms of its range of motion. Hopefully it’s just a long, slow, natural recovery. (I don’t say “hopefully” because I expect anything else, I just say it not to jinx myself.)

The absolute best thing about March 2025 is that it’s over.

Which brings us, as usual to my favorite internet thing of the month.

This month it was the Ghbilification of everything. So here’s the Ghibli version of me and Trine in Portugal: