Back after a break

OK, so you might say I've taken a break from blogging. That's a joke. At the end of July I took a fall on my bike and broke my jaw. Its mainly healed up, though I still have lots of metal braces bonded to my teeth. All that should come off in a few weeks, then I'm looking at a fair amount of dental work before I'm back to snuff.

I'd like to say this has been a life-changing experience that has given me a chance to reflect on my life and truly evaluate what is and is not important but to tell you the truth its mainly been a chance for me to skulk around the house and be miserable. My major insight is that modern life really revolves around two main poles - eating and talking - and that neither is very much fun with your jaws wired shut.

Anyway, in keeping with the "online thoughts" of this blog, I did find the Internet to be a huge relief in the early days of my accident because it gave me a chance to learn as much as I could about my condition and what I could expect. The general info I found about broken jaws was not so helpful. Most medical content I ran across (WebMD, RevolutionHealth, various hospital sites, etc.) was pretty generic and full of exortations to visit my doctor. More helpful was the few first-person accounts from people who had experienced or were experiencing the problem themselves. That helped give me a sense of what I could expect in the future, and that what I was feeling at the time was normal. I also found a lot of quackery - when I first got out of the hospital I was crazy to find information on how to speed recovery for broken bones. For those of you who have broken bones right now - the answer is "good nutrition", but I saw tons of ads for magnetic bracelets and such. I can completely see how attractive things like these are when you're under duress but it really brought home for me how important it is to view what's on the web with a critical eye.