Transient by Nature: Injured...ugh!

Well as some of you know…this blog has been a bit quiet lately, and so have emails. What oh what has Heather been up to since New Years??
I’ve been laid up injured!! AHHHH!!!!
So my ‘project’ that in all actuality, is not really a project because I know I can do it when I am warmed up, but I keep getting to excited for it and just try it.
Point being, is that on January 3rd, I got back from my visa run, and the first climb that I decided to try was this climb. No warm up, no yoga, no nothing. Just saddled up and started climbing. I don’t know what the hell happened but I will try to explain anyway.
I fell at a lower hold, and a friend that had climbed it before hand told me to try a good upper hold if I wanted to when there. Falling at the lower part is nothing new, the other 2 time I tried the climb I fell there also, and this day I wasn’t even warmed up and hadn’t climbed since the 23rd of December. Not TRYING to make excuses here, just setting the scene. I decided to try out the hold because I had already fallen on the climb and I wasn’t going to get it clean this go anyway. So I decided to investigate it and see if it would help me at all. When I got to that part of the climb, the hold was a bit out of my reach and I had to lean really far to the right to grab it. When I did, somehow my harness managed to slip behind my protruding ribcage as I was leaning so far and they were sticking out. Then my feet cut off of the rock and I held on with my right hand and locked off on the hold. However, when I did this, my core flexed, and pushed my muscle forward….pushing the harness forward….and my ribs with it. Basically the ribs stacked on top of each other and were out of place for more than a day. I was able to finish the climb with moderate pain, and then clean the gear off of it also. It hurt to move, it hurt to breathe, it hurt to lay down, it hurt to eat. Pretty much everything caused pain. I then felt a bit dizzy and went back to my bungalow to lie down. I slept until 1pm the next day, 27 hours total.

When I awoke, I sat up and sneezed, so painful!!! Then there was a cracking noise and then I sneezed again and it didn’t hurt as bad, I also could finally breathe easier. The ribs were back in place! I didn’t take any pain medicine because of my previous ulcer from all the medication from when I was hit by the car a few years ago. I can’t risk the ulcer coming back. So I slept a lot over the next week and tried to heal. Then the next week, I was able to at least walk down to the beach and buy a book at the shop there, and lie on a mat and read all day by the waters edge. What better place to be injured than on a beach in Thailand!?! Much of week 2 went in this fashion, not better enough to venture to Railey or Ao Nang because it hurt to do too much of one thing, but well enough to socialize and read a lot. Then this past week was even better, I swam a little bit, went with some of my climbing friends on a snorkeling trip to a nearby island, went shopping and to dinner in Ao Nang, and doing things again was so great for me!

This week I tried to climb again. Its been a slow process, and still quite painful for me, but I’m happy to just be moving around using my rusty muscles. I climbed 1 climb my first day back, then 2 the next day, and 1 today. I am just Top-roping them as I don’t want to re-injure myself again, but do want to be active. At this point, I don’t care if I finish a climb, or if I do it 5 times in one day, nor do I care right now what the climb is or how hard it is. I just need to be climbing something while I heal.
I don’t think the ribs are broken, I suspect the muscle is just badly damaged. And possibly the connective tissue also.