My Birthday in Las Vegas

Saturday was my 24th birthday, and to celebrate, me and 3 of my friends took a trip to Las Vegas. This was my first time in Vegas and I had a blast. I have some really great friends! We all had so much fun together and got along so well. I couldn't have asked for a better time. Here are some pictures from the trip:Here's a view from the plane

New York New York

As a surveyor, I had to get a picture of this!

Walking the strip

Eiffel tower

Paris

One of the pools at MGM Grand where we stayed

View from our hotel room

Great view of the strip. New York New York straight ahead.

We come in pairs ;)

View from one of the clubs

Me and Sonia

Somehow, we didn't have to pay any cover charges. Sonia was always able to get us into the clubs and we even scored this VIP table. It's great being a girl! :)

Fountain at our hotel. Look Marisol and I are the same height. ;)

Post Surgery

Today I started physical therapy and I got a new splint put on. I thought I'd put a picture up of my incision in case anyone wants to see it. It's about 4 inches long. I should get the stitches out on Wednesday. I realized when doing my exercises that I have very little range of motion. I could only bend my wrist down as far as 15 degrees and I can only touch my thumb to my index and middle fingers. I should get a lot of this movement back from doing the therapy, but the therapist said I probably won't have it 100% back for up to a year.

What's New

My surgery went well. My awesome parents came down to be there during the surgery and take care of me afterwards. Thanks Mom and Mark! It was really nice to have them here. I wasn't in too much pain, but I was taking my pain medication pretty religiously the first 5 days. I'm off it now and back at work this week and feeling pretty good. I go in to see the doctor again tomorrow and hopefully he will take the splint off my arm. It's even uglier than the cast I had on before. Then I believe he'll have me start physical therapy next week. Hopefully I'll be back playing volleyball by the fall. :)

On another note, I paid off my car this month! WOOHOO! I'm so excited about that. 4 years and 9 months ago I purchased a 2003 Ford Focus and it's finally all mine! What a great feeling. Now, of course, I want a new car, haha. But I'm going to put that off for a while. My car is just fine and I should take advantage of not having any car payment for a while.

And the answer is....Surgery

I went back to my orthopedist today, and after his review of my MRI and another x-ray, he decided I should have the surgery. The picture below is one of the images from the MRI. I'm pretty sure you can see where the break is. This is a side view of my wrist and the break is on my radius. That part on top seems to be sliding further down and that's why the doctor wants to do surgery and put a thin metal plate in there. He is afraid it could slide further and really give me problems later on.I have a tentative surgery date for Monday afternoon. The surgery itself should be about an hour. They will put me under anesthesia, but I should be able to go home afterwards. Unfortunately, I will have to take about a week off work to recover. If only this happened in August, I'd be able to use my sick days, but my work has a rule about not being able to access your sick time or vacation until you have been there a year.

The good news is this will speed up my recovery time. Instead of wearing my cast for another 4 weeks, I will only need to wear a splint after the surgery for 1-2 weeks and then begin physical therapy.

Medical Update

Yesterday I went to the Orthopedic to get my cast put on. He did an x-ray before putting the cast on and saw that the part of my radius that had the large break was not perfectly aligned. He showed me the image, and if he hadn't pointed it out, I wouldn't have even noticed the offset, but I did see it. He said he wanted to get a CT scan of it to see if I need surgery. He said because I'm so young, it's important that it heals correctly.

So that afternoon I went to the imaging office and got the CT scan. They sent the information directly to my Orthopedic, so now I'm just waiting to hear back from my doctor.

I'd rather not have to go through surgery, but I do want my wrist to heal well and not give me problems later on. Please keep me in your prayers that God will heal my wrist one way or other.

Memorial Day Weekend

Well, my long weekend started out with a bang....or should I say break? Thursday night I was playing volleyball at my league in Oakland. I was playing up at the net when I got a set that was far outside. I was moving backwards to reach for it and I tripped on the base of the pole, twisting my ankle and then landing on my wrist and breaking it. My wrist looked like it caved in and then bulged out like a crooked road. The pain was excrutiating, but the other players were very supportive, getting me ice, calling the ambulance, and a couple guys on my team even drove my car home for me since I took the ambulance to the hospital in Berkeley. They called my roommate, Marisol, for me and she came out to the hospital to sit with me and give me a ride home. Oh, and my friend Scott from my volleyball team followed me to the hospital and stayed until Marisol got there. He was really sweet as well.

My other friend, Sonia, and I were planning on leaving at 6am the next morning for our road trip to Oregon and Tahoe, so I asked Marisol to call her and let her know what happened. Without me even asking her to, Sonia drove out to Berkeley from Concord as well! I feel so lucky to have a couple of really good friends here. They are super sweet and I don't know what I would've done if I had to go through all that alone. Especially since right after Sonia came, the doctor reduced my wrist. This meant the doctor was on one side of me and the nurse on the other side and they pulled my wrist and reset it in place! Even though they had just put more morphine in my IV and injected two shots of something else into my wrist, I still cried out in pain and squirmed in my bed! To make a long story short, my ankle turned out fine, just a little sore, and my wrist was broken with multiple breaks in the radius and a small fracture to the ulna. We ended up leaving the hospital at about 2am. I am now wearing a splint and a sling and I go in today to get a cast put on.

As for the trip, Sonia and I still did our road trip, we just left a little later and she drove the whole way. It was so great to visit with my family (I was really wanting my Mommy at that point) and it was great for Sonia to meet everyone. She was amazed by their cabin and took lots of pictures.

On Sunday, we got back on the road and drove down to Lake Tahoe where her parents were staying in their timeshare. This was my first time at Tahoe and it was beautiful! This time I took most of the pictures. Sunday evening we went out for sushi with her parents and then stayed in their condo. Her parents are very nice and interesting people. Her dad is from the Czech Republic and her mom from Slovakia, so I love hearing their stories about how they came here and all of their travels.

The original reason for wanting to go to Tahoe was for Sonia and I to train for our Tahoe Relay that we have on June 13th. Well, now that I have a broken arm, I won't be running the race so we're looking for someone to replace my leg of the race. Sonia still got up Monday morning and tried to run 4 miles of her uphill portion, but she said she died at 3.5 miles....maybe it's a good thing I'm not running.

That afternoon, we all went for a hike down to a beach area of the lake. It was absolutely gorgeous! After we we finished our lunch on the sand, we started to hear thunder and heavy clouds began to move in. It was the neatest thing! It just started sprinkling as we were leaving. What a great day! Even with a broken wrist I was able to have an awesome weekend!

What a workout!

Lately I've been trying to amp up my running. For one: I'm training for the Lake Tahoe Relay next month. Two: I want to run a marathon by the end of the year. Three: I just feel out of shape and want to work on that. I've been running, but I can only push myself so much on my own. I've found that some of the sports stores around here offer free group runs in the evenings, so I decided to try one out last night. Well, I went to this particular one once before back in the fall, but I haven't gone since.

I just wanted to share the little story of last night because, looking back on it now, it's kind of a good one!

So I started out running with the group kind of towards the front (there were a few guys who were way ahead of me and I didn't even attempt to keep up). We ended up running in Shell Ridge rec area, which is up on the grassy hills with oak trees. It was a beautiful place and I was running well, keeping up with these two men. People started dropping off and turning back. I told myself I would run 30 minutes before turning around. I had a volleyball game at 8, so I couldn't run any longer than that. Well, the men came to the turnaround point right about that time, so I turned with them. They chatted with me a little bit, then slowly got ahead of me. I could still see one guy up ahead, so I just followed where he was going. Suddenly I didn't recognize the trail anymore. 'Am I going the right way?' I thought. The guy ahead slowed to a walk and I was able to catch up with him. "Are you part of the group run?" I asked. "No. Are you?" he responded. Oh no, I was following the wrong person! He helped me figure out which way I wanted to go to get out of there and so I took off, hoping to catch up with the group.

I got off of the trail and back to the streets, but it didn't seem like the same streets we came in on. I kept following the street I was on and looked up at the sign to see what street it was. 'Marshall Dr' haha, how funny is that? This was not the right street, but I kept following it hoping it would lead me to a familiar street. Well, it just seemed to keep winding around. It was a really pretty street with adorable houses and lots of shading trees but if I didn't find my way back soon, I wasn't going to make my game. 'At least I know I'm going the right direction,' I thought, because I was running toward the sun. 'Wait a second...the sun sets in the west and I'm pretty sure the store is north of here, so I'm not going the right direction!'

It seemed like a friendly enough neighborhood, so I decided to wave down the next car and ask for directions. Along came a car, and I stopped and waved, but apparently I'm not good at waving down cars because the lady just waved back and kept driving. Then I saw a couple doing some gardening in their front yard so I asked them for help. They were very sweet and seemed so excited just when I said hi. They eagerly directed me out to the main road, but I was a lot further down from the store that where I left from (and also downhill), but I had to hurry to get to my game. So I pushed up the hill, keeping up my rushed pace that I had been running for the last 10 minutes or so.

I finally made it back to my car at 7:50, so I had to immediately drive to my volleyball game. Good thing I brought my knee pads and volleyball shoes with me. I ran into the gym where my team was already warming up. Luckily they hadn't started on time. They were all relieved to see me since; they were starting to get worried. It'd be a great ending to my story if I said that we won.......but we didn't. :( My team hasn't been doing so well this season. Oh well, they're fun to play with and I definitely had a good workout last night. I ran for over an hour (and fast too, probably about 7 or 8 miles) and then I played volleyball for 45 minutes. If only I could keep this up every night, I'd be in great shape!