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What's Your Favorite Motivational Poster?
- Thread starter duglynukem
- Start date
Gern Blansten
Active Member
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- May 16, 2011
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- 999
duglynukem
Nuclear Advocate
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- Nov 25, 2005
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drjammer
????
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- Apr 15, 2008
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duglynukem
Nuclear Advocate
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- Nov 25, 2005
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Gern Blansten
Active Member
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- May 16, 2011
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Set-In-Stone
The Dude Abides
- Joined
- Jun 22, 2011
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Gern Blansten
Active Member
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- May 16, 2011
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Since it's the holidays and all...
Joe M
New Member
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2012
- Messages
- 6
I like this one:
Bikes saved my life - by Kym Liebig
I wasn’t going to write this piece, but my wife convinced me that I should, that the story might have some significance to people who haven’t lived their past year in the same way I have. She’s a pretty convincing wife, so I let her have her way.
So, sorry for the upcoming medical content, but here goes: exactly one year ago today, entirely out of the blue, I suffered a Category 4 Sub Arachnoid Haemorrhage.
And although I argued with my wife that this is a biker’s newsletter rather than an episode of ‘House’, she countered by saying “And what were you doing when you had the Haemorrhage?”
Okay, so I had a Category 4 Sub Arachnoid Haemorrhage while I was out in my shed, fitting a new shock to my race bike. So the first part of the story sort of has something to do with bikes. And as much as I hate to admit defeat, the more I think about it, from the moment the blood vessel in my brain decided to burst, a lot of what followed had to do with bikes.
As it happens, when the particular blood vessel that burst in my brain on October 3 last year lets go, most people respond by quietly dying. The immediate symptom is what doctors refer to as a ‘thunderclap headache’ – the worst headache you’ve ever experienced, ramping up from zero to maximum pain instantly. It certainly caught my attention. I can’t recommend burst blood vessels in the brain to anyone. I swore quietly and stood up, hoping the altitude change would ease the pain. Nup. So I knelt down again. After a minute or so of staring at the whipper snipper, I stood up, staggered out of the shed, and went to have a quiet lie down on the lawn.
My wife, who would normally have been at work at the time, saw me from the kitchen window, and thought it a little odd that I’d decided to have a kip on the lawn. She came out, took a look at me and asked me if I thought she should call an ambulance. I told her I thought I’d be okay. She ignored me and called one anyhow. Smart woman.
The ambulance took me to the local hospital quickly, where I was given a CT Scan. When the scans were ready, all at once everyone in the hospital seemed to raise their eyebrows in unison, and then another ambulance took me very quickly to the city’s main hospital. Bemused, I passed the time mostly by vomiting and saying ‘it hurts.’
At the city hospital, The World’s Best Neurosurgeon just happened to be hanging around with nothing better to do when I arrived. Evidently, being nearly dead doesn’t feel quite as awful as I thought it would, because it came as something of a shock to me to be told that unless something radical was done – and soon – I would be dead. Maybe I just catch on slowly. By the look on my wife’s face, she must have caught on a lot more quickly than I had. She looked much paler than I remember her ever looking.
When, as my brother so eloquently put it later, ‘the shit had come down’, my wife knelt down alongside me and told me that the surgeons were going to have to chop a big piece out of my skull, open up a window, find the bleed and try to clip it closed without further damaging my brain or having me bleed to death. I responded by feebly asking “Do you reckon I’ll be better in time for the next race?” The next race was two weeks away. There’s that mild bike obsession again. I’m not allowed to tell you what my wife’s response was.
Neurosurgery knocks you around a bit, as I noticed the next day. The ‘I’m alive’ bit was good. The drugs, headache and subsequent two rounds of Vaso Spasms (a fancy name for a type of stroke) were not so good. I lived through the strokes, and made jokes that “two strokes are great fun”. No-one laughed.
I had a big titanium plate, a handful of screws and thirty-two staples patching up my head. A nurse came around one day to remove the staples. I asked jokingly if they used a staple remover for that, or pliers. He said it was pretty much pliers. Anaesthetic? No sir, not today. I don’t look at staples the same way anymore nowadays.
My wife and brother were always there, looking after me, while everyone tried to work out the extent of my brain damage. When I could talk, all I talked about was bikes and racing. They humoured me because bikes seemed to give me something to aim for. I was in Intensive Care for three weeks, and I’d talk bikes to anyone who’d listen, but strangely, there aren’t many bike enthusiasts in Intensive Care.
I’m over 190 centimetres tall and normally only about 75 kilos. By the time I got out of I.C and into rehab, I’d lost 12 kilos and I was a skeleton. But I treated rehab like a jailbreak. I did everything to appear healthier than I was. I ate until I felt sick, trying to gain weight. I hauled myself along on furniture trying to convince nurses I could walk. I even hauled myself along to the showers on my own one day, and scared the shit out of the whole ward when I arrived back two hours later looking like a slightly soapy corpse.
I tried to read bike magazines, but my eyesight was a mess. The racing season was slipping by, and I finally resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t race again in 2011. One or two well-meaning people suggested that maybe riding again might not be a good idea. I’ll make the ‘brain damaged’ comments, thanks people, you can kindly leave.
I got out. I sweet-talked, faked, bribed and swindled my way out of rehab so early that the brief car ride home almost killed me – I just couldn’t bend properly to sit anymore, or support myself, or anything much. At home, all I could do was sit I a reclining chair my wife had bought for me. But I had a goal. While I’d been in hospital, eBay packages had been arriving every day. Race bike parts. Within a week, I could shuffle out to my shed to unwrap some of them. Soon after, working five minutes at a time, I could start to fit some of the easy stuff. Even stuff like brushing my teeth wore me out at that stage, but I kept at it. I felt stronger, warmer and better in my shed, near my bikes. My wife would check on me every few minutes, because after all, I’d nearly died in my shed not that long ago. But now it was making me alive again.
I planted a secret goal in my mind. There was a track day planned for January 26[sup]th[/sup], Australia Day. I thought I could do it. I could work towards it and prove a point.
I’ve only recently discovered the conspiracy that shadowed that day. I wasn’t really ready, of course. My wife knew it, but to her great credit, she didn’t try to stop me. Instead, she had my brother recruit a whole crew of my racing mates who simply seemed to show up on the day almost by accident. Little did I know they had been briefed very strictly to watch me like a hawk, basically do everything for me, and stop things the moment I so much as sneezed.
I had come a long way. I could walk (though not far) and talk and see. But that day, after slipping through scrutineering (wearing a hat to hide my brain surgery scar!) I sat in the warm up area, the bike rumbling beneath me, and I felt better. Really better. Less than 4 months after nearly dying, I was about to ride again.
Perhaps adrenalin has healing properties, because out into that first session all the lingering pain disappeared and I just felt good. I smiled ‘til my face hurt! Turn two, lap two, knee down again. Bliss. I’d gone out cautiously in the intermediate/slow group, but after two sessions I bumped up to intermediate/fast and really started enjoying myself. I was a patched-up wreck. My bike was even worse. But there wasn’t a happier man in the world on that day. I’ll never forget it.
I got tired fast, of course, cut all of my sessions down by a couple of laps, but went home grinning. I grinned for days. I was back!
My first day back at the track, Australia Day 2012 – I decided to make my own ‘motivational poster’ out of the pic. My leathers are hanging off me. The bike is held together with duct tape and the rider is held together with titanium screws, but there’s a huge grin behind that visor.
Lows follow highs. Months of not being able to work had punched a hole in the family budget, and I patched it by selling my beloved Triumph Daytona 675. I hated doing it, but it had to be done. No more road bike. And that’s what led to perhaps my final ‘bikes saved my life’ moment.
Part of recovering from a brain injury is fatigue, and there’s a thin line between balancing fatigue, and winding up with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or clinical depression. I fought pretty hard to get better. I hate being sick, and I hate even more being a liability. So I started working as early and as much as I could, trying to be cautious about it, not always succeeding. And I started to become a Grumpy Bastard. My family weren’t afraid to tell me about it, because of course, they were still watching me pretty closely. They were concerned I was headed down the path to depression.
Cue a call from a friend of mine who had plans to go overseas for a month. He also owns a Yamaha FZ6N. Would I like to ‘look after it?’ Hell yes! Spring, self-employment and a road bike to ride again. Perfect. I could ride at a moment’s notice. And I did. Often. It was a good felling. And not a week later, the same people who had been noticing how down I was…were commenting on how up I was. My wife, in particular, summed it up. “Bikes haven’t just made you better, they help make you a better person. You are healthier, happier and better-adjusted when you have a bike to ride whenever you want. We have to get you another road bike as soon as we can.”
(And no, you can’t borrow my wife.)
Anyhow, The Yamaha is due to go back to its rightful owner this week, so I’ve started looking for a cheap and cheerful road bike to help me continue my recovery. And while I’m not sure they’re what any doctor would prescribe, I am convinced 100% that bikes have helped me stay alive, and recover, too. They’ve been a big part of giving me the focus I needed, they’ve helped me set goals, and nowadays bikes just make me happy again whenever the grind of recovery gets me down. Any long road, after all, is best taken with a bike.
I have less tolerance than ever for all those people who roll out the ‘Temporary Australians’ cliché and talk about how dangerous bikes are. When something as random as a blood vessel bursting in your brain could kill you at any time, why waste energy trying to live life more safely? Safety is a myth. Let’s embrace life with all its risks, enjoy ourselves and really feel alive.
This weekend I’m out at the track racing again. I doubt I’ll make the podium, but that’s okay, goals change sometimes and nowadays I mostly race myself. My lap times are already a bit better than they were at this time last year, but more importantly I’m a lot wiser, even if sometimes I might seem a bit slow.
I trust you’ve enjoyed my little story, and of course if you haven’t, you can blame my wife.
But mostly I hope it might help you see your riding and what it’s really worth from a different angle. It’s not just a selfish hobby. It can be self-improvement, too.
I’d love to hear how you think riding makes you better. Join in, compare notes, swap stories or just heap abuse on me on our Facebook page (here) and have your say. We can’t live forever, but I think that we owe it to ourselves and our families to truly be alive while we’re here.
Yours in the burnout, not the fading away
Kym
Bikes saved my life - by Kym Liebig
I wasn’t going to write this piece, but my wife convinced me that I should, that the story might have some significance to people who haven’t lived their past year in the same way I have. She’s a pretty convincing wife, so I let her have her way.
So, sorry for the upcoming medical content, but here goes: exactly one year ago today, entirely out of the blue, I suffered a Category 4 Sub Arachnoid Haemorrhage.
And although I argued with my wife that this is a biker’s newsletter rather than an episode of ‘House’, she countered by saying “And what were you doing when you had the Haemorrhage?”
Okay, so I had a Category 4 Sub Arachnoid Haemorrhage while I was out in my shed, fitting a new shock to my race bike. So the first part of the story sort of has something to do with bikes. And as much as I hate to admit defeat, the more I think about it, from the moment the blood vessel in my brain decided to burst, a lot of what followed had to do with bikes.
As it happens, when the particular blood vessel that burst in my brain on October 3 last year lets go, most people respond by quietly dying. The immediate symptom is what doctors refer to as a ‘thunderclap headache’ – the worst headache you’ve ever experienced, ramping up from zero to maximum pain instantly. It certainly caught my attention. I can’t recommend burst blood vessels in the brain to anyone. I swore quietly and stood up, hoping the altitude change would ease the pain. Nup. So I knelt down again. After a minute or so of staring at the whipper snipper, I stood up, staggered out of the shed, and went to have a quiet lie down on the lawn.
My wife, who would normally have been at work at the time, saw me from the kitchen window, and thought it a little odd that I’d decided to have a kip on the lawn. She came out, took a look at me and asked me if I thought she should call an ambulance. I told her I thought I’d be okay. She ignored me and called one anyhow. Smart woman.
The ambulance took me to the local hospital quickly, where I was given a CT Scan. When the scans were ready, all at once everyone in the hospital seemed to raise their eyebrows in unison, and then another ambulance took me very quickly to the city’s main hospital. Bemused, I passed the time mostly by vomiting and saying ‘it hurts.’
At the city hospital, The World’s Best Neurosurgeon just happened to be hanging around with nothing better to do when I arrived. Evidently, being nearly dead doesn’t feel quite as awful as I thought it would, because it came as something of a shock to me to be told that unless something radical was done – and soon – I would be dead. Maybe I just catch on slowly. By the look on my wife’s face, she must have caught on a lot more quickly than I had. She looked much paler than I remember her ever looking.
When, as my brother so eloquently put it later, ‘the shit had come down’, my wife knelt down alongside me and told me that the surgeons were going to have to chop a big piece out of my skull, open up a window, find the bleed and try to clip it closed without further damaging my brain or having me bleed to death. I responded by feebly asking “Do you reckon I’ll be better in time for the next race?” The next race was two weeks away. There’s that mild bike obsession again. I’m not allowed to tell you what my wife’s response was.
Neurosurgery knocks you around a bit, as I noticed the next day. The ‘I’m alive’ bit was good. The drugs, headache and subsequent two rounds of Vaso Spasms (a fancy name for a type of stroke) were not so good. I lived through the strokes, and made jokes that “two strokes are great fun”. No-one laughed.
I had a big titanium plate, a handful of screws and thirty-two staples patching up my head. A nurse came around one day to remove the staples. I asked jokingly if they used a staple remover for that, or pliers. He said it was pretty much pliers. Anaesthetic? No sir, not today. I don’t look at staples the same way anymore nowadays.
My wife and brother were always there, looking after me, while everyone tried to work out the extent of my brain damage. When I could talk, all I talked about was bikes and racing. They humoured me because bikes seemed to give me something to aim for. I was in Intensive Care for three weeks, and I’d talk bikes to anyone who’d listen, but strangely, there aren’t many bike enthusiasts in Intensive Care.
I’m over 190 centimetres tall and normally only about 75 kilos. By the time I got out of I.C and into rehab, I’d lost 12 kilos and I was a skeleton. But I treated rehab like a jailbreak. I did everything to appear healthier than I was. I ate until I felt sick, trying to gain weight. I hauled myself along on furniture trying to convince nurses I could walk. I even hauled myself along to the showers on my own one day, and scared the shit out of the whole ward when I arrived back two hours later looking like a slightly soapy corpse.
I tried to read bike magazines, but my eyesight was a mess. The racing season was slipping by, and I finally resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t race again in 2011. One or two well-meaning people suggested that maybe riding again might not be a good idea. I’ll make the ‘brain damaged’ comments, thanks people, you can kindly leave.
I got out. I sweet-talked, faked, bribed and swindled my way out of rehab so early that the brief car ride home almost killed me – I just couldn’t bend properly to sit anymore, or support myself, or anything much. At home, all I could do was sit I a reclining chair my wife had bought for me. But I had a goal. While I’d been in hospital, eBay packages had been arriving every day. Race bike parts. Within a week, I could shuffle out to my shed to unwrap some of them. Soon after, working five minutes at a time, I could start to fit some of the easy stuff. Even stuff like brushing my teeth wore me out at that stage, but I kept at it. I felt stronger, warmer and better in my shed, near my bikes. My wife would check on me every few minutes, because after all, I’d nearly died in my shed not that long ago. But now it was making me alive again.
I planted a secret goal in my mind. There was a track day planned for January 26[sup]th[/sup], Australia Day. I thought I could do it. I could work towards it and prove a point.
I’ve only recently discovered the conspiracy that shadowed that day. I wasn’t really ready, of course. My wife knew it, but to her great credit, she didn’t try to stop me. Instead, she had my brother recruit a whole crew of my racing mates who simply seemed to show up on the day almost by accident. Little did I know they had been briefed very strictly to watch me like a hawk, basically do everything for me, and stop things the moment I so much as sneezed.
I had come a long way. I could walk (though not far) and talk and see. But that day, after slipping through scrutineering (wearing a hat to hide my brain surgery scar!) I sat in the warm up area, the bike rumbling beneath me, and I felt better. Really better. Less than 4 months after nearly dying, I was about to ride again.
Perhaps adrenalin has healing properties, because out into that first session all the lingering pain disappeared and I just felt good. I smiled ‘til my face hurt! Turn two, lap two, knee down again. Bliss. I’d gone out cautiously in the intermediate/slow group, but after two sessions I bumped up to intermediate/fast and really started enjoying myself. I was a patched-up wreck. My bike was even worse. But there wasn’t a happier man in the world on that day. I’ll never forget it.
I got tired fast, of course, cut all of my sessions down by a couple of laps, but went home grinning. I grinned for days. I was back!
My first day back at the track, Australia Day 2012 – I decided to make my own ‘motivational poster’ out of the pic. My leathers are hanging off me. The bike is held together with duct tape and the rider is held together with titanium screws, but there’s a huge grin behind that visor.
Lows follow highs. Months of not being able to work had punched a hole in the family budget, and I patched it by selling my beloved Triumph Daytona 675. I hated doing it, but it had to be done. No more road bike. And that’s what led to perhaps my final ‘bikes saved my life’ moment.
Part of recovering from a brain injury is fatigue, and there’s a thin line between balancing fatigue, and winding up with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or clinical depression. I fought pretty hard to get better. I hate being sick, and I hate even more being a liability. So I started working as early and as much as I could, trying to be cautious about it, not always succeeding. And I started to become a Grumpy Bastard. My family weren’t afraid to tell me about it, because of course, they were still watching me pretty closely. They were concerned I was headed down the path to depression.
Cue a call from a friend of mine who had plans to go overseas for a month. He also owns a Yamaha FZ6N. Would I like to ‘look after it?’ Hell yes! Spring, self-employment and a road bike to ride again. Perfect. I could ride at a moment’s notice. And I did. Often. It was a good felling. And not a week later, the same people who had been noticing how down I was…were commenting on how up I was. My wife, in particular, summed it up. “Bikes haven’t just made you better, they help make you a better person. You are healthier, happier and better-adjusted when you have a bike to ride whenever you want. We have to get you another road bike as soon as we can.”
(And no, you can’t borrow my wife.)
Anyhow, The Yamaha is due to go back to its rightful owner this week, so I’ve started looking for a cheap and cheerful road bike to help me continue my recovery. And while I’m not sure they’re what any doctor would prescribe, I am convinced 100% that bikes have helped me stay alive, and recover, too. They’ve been a big part of giving me the focus I needed, they’ve helped me set goals, and nowadays bikes just make me happy again whenever the grind of recovery gets me down. Any long road, after all, is best taken with a bike.
I have less tolerance than ever for all those people who roll out the ‘Temporary Australians’ cliché and talk about how dangerous bikes are. When something as random as a blood vessel bursting in your brain could kill you at any time, why waste energy trying to live life more safely? Safety is a myth. Let’s embrace life with all its risks, enjoy ourselves and really feel alive.
This weekend I’m out at the track racing again. I doubt I’ll make the podium, but that’s okay, goals change sometimes and nowadays I mostly race myself. My lap times are already a bit better than they were at this time last year, but more importantly I’m a lot wiser, even if sometimes I might seem a bit slow.
I trust you’ve enjoyed my little story, and of course if you haven’t, you can blame my wife.
But mostly I hope it might help you see your riding and what it’s really worth from a different angle. It’s not just a selfish hobby. It can be self-improvement, too.
I’d love to hear how you think riding makes you better. Join in, compare notes, swap stories or just heap abuse on me on our Facebook page (here) and have your say. We can’t live forever, but I think that we owe it to ourselves and our families to truly be alive while we’re here.
Yours in the burnout, not the fading away
Kym
duglynukem
Nuclear Advocate
- Joined
- Nov 25, 2005
- Messages
- 1,620
