I broke my hip in a bicycle accident in San Francisco in 1994. I stopped in Noe Valley at a garage sale that had been abandoned with a FREE sign. Nothing of interest, so I began to pedal away and my front wheel caught in a wide seam in the concrete and I tipped over to the right and I was unable to stick my foot out to stop my fall because of toe clips connecting my shoe to the pedal.

     So I fell over sideways and smacked my right hip against the edge of the curb. A man and a woman saw me unable to get up and helped me and drove me to San Francisco General Hospital. They helped me hobble in. I was x-rayed and a guy came back from the x-ray developing room saying DON’T MOVE THAT LEG. A clean break of the femoral neck.

     They wheeled me into the operating room only 90 minutes after I was injured. Just before the surgery, two doctors stood and argued about it with me in the middle. One guy wanted to do a full prosthetic replacement, the other wanted to re-connect the broken parts with three lag bolts. “This guy is young [for a broken hip], he can make a full recovery.” Eventually the lag bolt doc won, and before the full prosthetics doc walked away, he leaned down and whispered into my ear, “In six months you’ll be back here and we’ll start over.”  I guess he thought I was already under anesthesia.

     A couple days later I was home and crutching around and I yakked over the fence with the neighbor cat lady. She was a nurse. She agreed with the full prosthetics doctor and said I was doomed to suffer avascular necrosis, where the blood supply to the head of the thigh bone is cut off, causing the bone to die and the joint to collapse.

     A month later, running back Bo Jackson of the Oakland Raiders dislocated his hip in an NFL game. The team negligently did not give him immediate treatment and he didn’t have surgery until two days later, and then he notoriously suffered avascular necrosis and required a full prosthetic replacement.

     So I was pretty darned worried about it. But I never had any subsequent problems. I played city-league softball until I was 64 and never hit another home run, but I did have three triples and 28 doubles over the years.

     So last month I used a chain saw for the first time in my life to cut down two small trees in the yard. Trunks of five- or six-inch diameter. I’ve long since developed methodologies to prevent stress on my metal hip–when I’m hoeing weeds, I stand on my left leg, etc.

     I was so preoccupied with handling the chain saw that I inadvertently sprained the metal hip. It’s been 29 days since the last time I rode my bike. I’ve been haunted by the idea of becoming a cripple.  

     And that’s why I don’t have a new story this month.