Time Flies Like An Arrow
Fruit flies like a banana.
It seems that every time I think I'm going to keep up to date with writing here, it fails miserably, and then when I finally get some idea in my head to come back and write something again, it's multiple weeks or months later and so much shit has happened that it's not even worth trying to recap the events of the intervening period. Except that once again I seem to have proven that blackbirds are not nearly as indestructible as we sometimes like to think we are.
I'd managed to get my deadlift back up over 400lbs, and then the following week when I was just doing a regular workout, I guess I wasn't paying attention to the underhand arm on my mixed grip. Rather than having the arm completely locked out, it was slightly bent, and about halfway up on a rep at 315 (I'd already done 3x3 at this weight, so it's not like I was struggling), I tore my left distal biceps tendon. A couple of weeks later I had surgery, and now I'm in the entirely enviable position of having to rehab two body parts at once.
Roughly a week and a half post-surgery, while still in the elbow brace (I'm still in the brace for a couple more weeks), I said "fuck it" and drove up to Tahoe for the day to go skiing. I just wanted to do a few easy runs to see how my knee would hold up, and at least I can report that went well. If I'd fallen on my left arm, I'd probably have been totally fucked, so it is, I'm sure, a good thing that this did not happen. One thing I did notice is that my right knee felt the bumps in the terrain a bit more, but that's not all that surprising since there's still a non-trivial strength mismatch.
Elbow/biceps rehab is about 3 months, so I figure that when I'm done with the arm, I'll be done with the leg, and then I should be good to go, and with any luck that will be the last surgical intervention that I need for awhile. This one-injury-per-year thing has got to stop, although technically I've actually had two surgeries this year; a week prior to the deadlift incident, I went to the banana doctor for a snippity-snip. It's arguable that the banana modification (technically, I guess it was more like a berry modification, since the banana itself is still 100% intact) was indirectly responsible for the biceps tear, because my balls were still a little bit sore when I was lifting and I think I was trying to keep the deadlift bar from hitting them on the way up.
Whatever the reason, I think it's fair to say that I am over my quota for surgeries in 2018. Fuck, I think I'm over my quota for the damn decade, and I'm expecting that the next couple of years (at least!) are going to be boring from a medical perspective.
Before we move on from medical-related topics, I would also note that I'm running a second round of BPC-157 with the hope that it speeds the healing of my elbow. The first trial, which was a somewhat casual experiment to see if I could feel anything different at above a conscious threshold level, didn't really produce any results, positive, negative, or otherwise, but I think there were multiple factors working against me here, not the least of which is the fact that I was trying to run this trial at 8 months post-surgery, after a lot of the major healing had already taken place. At least with the elbow, the start of the trial and the surgery were only 10 days apart, so if this stuff does actually work, intuitively I believe that I have a better chance of experiencing some positive effects.
This time around, I purchased my BPC-157 from a better supplier; I had no reason to suspect anything was wrong with the first batch, but the supplier of the second batch is very highly regarded in the world of both legal and less-than-legal bodybuilding / biohacking chemicals. The place I got the first batch from? Who knows. Since BPC-157 is legal but unregulated, you really have no idea if what you're buying is what you think you're buying, so quality sourcing, inasmuch as is possible, is essential. I recall one reddit article comment where the poster mentioned feeling a slight tingle at the injection site; this was definitely something that never happened to me with the first batch. The second batch, however, did occasionally produce a non-null sensation (depending on where the injection was done).
I also bought more of the stuff; rather than just picking up one vial "to see what happens" I acquired enough to do a legitimate run - 6 weeks of 500 micrograms per day, with the injections rotated between my right knee, my left knee, and my left arm. The stuff has no known negative side effects, so I'm not worried about my balls falling off or my head exploding, but if I'm going to be sticking myself with a needle on a daily basis, I should make sure that the parameters of my experiment are such that I've given myself the best odds of success. I started this run on 18 March, and subjectively it feels like my elbow is healing more quickly than expected, but I could be completely full of shit, because herein lies the problem with all of this: I have no control group. I'm not going to go fuck up my other biceps and get surgery and do the recovery without BPC-157 to have something to compare to, so I'm pretty much just relying on the imperfect tools of self-assessment and subjective feelings. When I go back to the doctor in a couple of weeks, I'll be getting the brace off, but that's the normal recovery schedule for this injury anyway. Maybe I'll discover that the muscle atrophy isn't as bad as I expected or something. We will see - right now I believe that it's working, and maybe the placebo effect is all that we really need here.
So far we are one week into the trial.
In other news... well, there's a bunch of other news, but it's getting late and I don't feel like writing any more just now. So instead I will just leave myself a reminder to come back tomorrow and ponder through questions around motivation, the mechanisms by which we choose the paths we walk and the decisions we make, and why it is that one of my greatest fears is turning into my mother.
Caw caw, fuckers! :-P