Trauma for breakfast!

Well, folks, ladies & gentlemen, boys & girls, children of alllll ages...as you may well have noticed, I am once again late in updating my 'Tree of the Week' entries. Unlike last week, tho', this time 'round I have the best of reasons for my tardiness. Specifically, this delay is due to the fact that on Saturday the 22nd of September I, while climbing some dozen feet off the ground in a Cucumbertree (Magnolia acuminata) at the Morton Arboretum in the company of my family & room-mate, broke my long-standing tradition of extreme caution while engaged in such arborial pursuits and pulled a stupid-ass stunt, which resulted in my tumbling precipitously to the ground and fracturing two vertebrae in my neck. After spending the rest of that day, the following day, and most of Monday at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, Il, I was released to freedom on the condition that I spend some month or two with a brace constantly about my neck to ensure that these bones heal themselves properly.

All of which, as ye may well guess, is a 'major bummer', as the kids would have it, but like all clouds, this one is not without a silver lining of its own. Specifically, I now have megabytes and megabytes of X-rays, MR images, and CT scans of my precious little body, which form the source of the User Image seen accompanying this post. Furthermore, I now know that, in addition to my sadly long-lost third thumb, I was in fact born with another wonderfully freakish congenital birth 'defect', which had gone un-noticed by the medical community until this accident: my sixth and seventh neck vertebrae (the ones injured by my fall) are partially fused in a way that is distinctly un-natural for a mammal of any sort. The doctors hypothesized that this fusion may have given them the added support which saved my neck and spinal column from worse injury than it, in fact, experienced. Also, I am now able to tell, to anyone willing to listen, a new anecdote which provides further evidence (as if any were required!) of my being one hardcore motherfucker; namely that I was able to, after the fall put me into a state of physiological shock and cracked two of my vertebrae and tore more muscles than I realized my torso had, lift myself off the ground and walk a good thirty feet to the road, and that I refused any ambulance ride to the hospital.

But, despite these distinct advantages (made all the more advantageous when one is a shameless braggart like me), the situation is still, as a whole, a 'major bummer'. It ruins my hopes and plans for obtaining that job at the Chicago Botanical Garden, leaves me with a long stretch of time wherein I can undertake no exercise more strenuous than a simple walk, and problematizes all my efforts to find me some good down-home lovin' - not to mention its deleteriously stressful effects on my friends and family, who all have enough worries and cares to deal with already without the added problem of my own basic physical survival, and who had already seen me go into one (admittedly much different) hospital during the summer, and therefore do not deserve to have to see me go into another. But, I am resolved to make the best of a bad situation, and shall do so! After all, is that not what all of life is: making the best of a bad situation? And so are not we humans already, merely by virtue of our existence, endowed by nature with a variety of faculties that allow us to do just that? Aye, aye, we are, and so I doubtlessly shall succeed, and gild these clouds with no mere silver lining, but rather with a bedding of the purest platinum metal!

Making the best of a bad situation since 1986,
--mark