Silver Lining?

If you had told me back in that first week of March that my crash would have a silver lining I would have been highly skeptical. It was hard to imagine anything good coming from the broken bones, abrasions, aches and pains. Even now as I write this, knowing all I’m about to share, I’m not sure silver is the color I would choose to describe the ‘treasure’ that March 1st cloud concealed.

The first hint that there would be more to this story came in the initial radiology report: patient appears to have an enlarged pituitary gland, follow up testing should be pursued to evaluate further (or something like that). I asked my doctor about it and he said it was a common condition which for most people didn’t cause problems and we should focus on the issues at hand. That same week a second CT scan confirmed the enlarged sella but again I was told it was probably nothing to worry about. While I didn’t worry too much I did enough research to be aware of the issues and it remained in the back of my mind.

In May, after I was moderately healed and Egan had arrived, I pursued that ‘follow up testing’. I still wasn’t concerned. I wasn’t feeling any symptoms and expected the tests to show a condition that I might have to watch in the years to come. Unfortunately, my concern took a quantum step up midway through my MRI when the radiologist asked me 'Do you get a lot of headaches?'

Tumor is not a word you ever really want to hear your doctor say. At least until they discover the ‘male sexual enhancement tumor’ or the ‘detachable fat burning tumor’. ‘Benign tumor’ is obviously a better combination of words than ‘malignant tumor or cancer’ but benign tumor inside your head is not a happy combination. So, needless to say, I was less than thrilled when I heard my doctor say I had a Macro Pituitary Adenoma (tumor).


A quick geography/physiology lesson for those of you unfamiliar with the pituitary gland. It resides in your head, almost the geometric center of your head. While it isn’t technically part of your brain this may be one of those cases that can be added to ‘horse shoes’ and ‘hand grenades’ on the list of situations where close counts. Zooming in, the pituitary gland resides at the base of your brain as a protrusion off the hypothalamus. It sits on a small bone called the sella, just below the optic chiasm and between the left and right carotid arteries. At first glance, not the easiest place to swing a scalpel. The pituitary gland is the link between the nervous system and the endocrine system and is responsible for regulating hormone production, a relatively important task in the functioning of the human body.

As it turns out, pituitary tumors are fairly common. Studies have found that as many as one in five adults have a pituitary tumor. Fortunately, most don’t cause any problems and go unnoticed. The tumors that do get noticed usually cause problems in several ways. They can interfere with hormone production which may or may not be severe enough to warrant treatment. They can put pressure on or displace the optic chiasm, causing vision loss. They can also put pressure on the carotid arteries and possibly cause a rupture and hemorrhaging in your skull (should be avoided if possible).

So, getting back to my situation, my Macro Pituitary Adenoma is about the size of a large cherry tomato. The tumor has displaced my pituitary gland and probably inhibited some hormone production. Luckily, I have not noticed any symptoms. My vision has tested fine. My hormone levels are almost normal and my carotid arteries are still intact. But the tumor has already displaced my optic nerves and is very close to the carotid artery on the left. So, if it hadn’t been for my bike accident I may not have discovered this tumor until it was much more difficult to remove. This early discovery probably warrants the designation ‘silver lining’. However, they still need to go in and get this thing out so at the moment the silver looks a bit tarnished.

Monday morning Dr. K is going to polish it up for me. Sometime around 7 I will undergo transsphenoidal surgery to resect my adenoma. Luckily for me Dr. K performs these surgeries 3 or 4 times a week with very few complications.

Stay tuned, we’ll keep you posted.

8 weeks of love

It's hard to believe that Egan turned 8 weeks old this week. He's no longer the floppy newborn which he was a few weeks ago. He almost holding his head up which is really fun to see. Many of his friends of the same age can already hold theirs up, but we figure that he will take a bit longer as he's just so much bigger than they are! He's in the 95th percentile in height and weight. At 6 weeks he weighed 12 pounds 15 ounces and was 23.5 inches long. We figure he now weighs about 14 pounds.

The great news about him being a big baby is that he's a great sleeper. We give him a bath each night before bed and he often conks out right there in the bathroom. For the past 2 weeks he has slept 6 or 7 hours straight. Just our luck, he'll start waking up more now that I wrote this, but as far as I can tell, he can't read yet, so I'm hoping he won't catch wind of this post.

Our favorite weekly activity is post-natal yoga. It's really a baby spa, disguised in a yoga studio. We do 'yoga' together for 30 minutes, followed by baby massage. Being in a room with 15 naked babies is really something else. It feels so Berkeley and I love it! For the last hour of class, there are baby holders who whisk your baby away and bounce him to sleep while you do yoga. The whole experience is pure heaven.

Although neither Mike nor I are bike racing right now, we have gone to watch a few races. One of our teammates gave Egan his own Metromint dots to wear and he wears them proudly at each race he attends.

In other news, we have a bassinet which originally belonged to my grandmother (Eleanor, after whom Egan is named). She used it with her 3 children, including my mother, and it was later used for some of the grandchildren of my generation. We had hoped to use it for Egan, but learned that it was painted with lead paint. So, Mike, Morgan and I are restoring it for this generation of great grandchildren. We repainted it and are now working on sewing a cover for it. Morgan plans to embroider the cover and we're making a photo album of the restoration to send keep with it for future generations. Unfortunately, Egan is already too long to sleep in it, but we plan to have him play in it before we pass it onto whomever is the next family member to have a baby.

Morgan is an amazing big sister. She absolutely adores Egan and has become quite confident with him. Watching he fall in love with him has been such a joy for Mike and me. If you need an amazing babysitter for your infant, she's ready!

We'll try to post photos and updates on Egan more frequently throughout the summer. Until then, Egan says, "Rock On!"

A Quick Peek Back

Now that a few months have passed and I can turn my head without pain I thought I would take a quick look back at my crash. I’ve been meaning to sit down and write this for a while and thought I should record my thoughts before life moves too far down the road.

Here is what I know about what happened. On March 1 I was involved in an accident during a bike race in the Central Valley. Two of my competitors became entangled and caused a chain reaction crash that, from what I hear, took down half the group. I don’t remember any of the crash itself. I’ve learned since that I went over the handle bars at 30 mph and landed on the left side of my face. I’m told I was unconscious for 30-45 seconds. My first memory after the crash is of another competitor leaning over me asking me “Who is the president?” I couldn’t answer. I remember thinking “I know we just changed but I can’t remember who won”. I knew where I was, the name of the race and maybe even the date. I also knew I had been in a crash. At the time I knew I had gone down hard but didn’t think I was too badly injured.


If you’ve never crashed your bike while riding fast you’re lucky. My favorite description comes from local cycling guru Michael Hernandez in
this post

"well, it's like this ~ get in your car and find yourself a nice quite country road. Bring the speed up to around 30mph. Keep it steady at 30, maybe click on the 'cruise control' if you've got it, ok?

now, roll down your window, peep your head out the car and look down at the passing pavement. Look at all those jagged little crushed rocks and sand-papery surfaces. Ok, got used to the speed? Then open up your door ... don't be afraid. Open up your door and lean out a bit (keep that speed up!). Now slowly reach a hand down toward the road zipping by underneath. Think about it, just for an instant ... reach out and touch that road. Go ahead, try it. Reach out and touch it.

and just when you're about to touch the road? in that moment of concentration where your fingers are dangling between the edge of safety and dangerous contact ...

have somebody push your ass out of the car."

So there I was, lying on the pavement after ‘having my ass pushed out of the car’. While I wasn’t too concerned about my injuries, those who were treating me were. I was strapped to a back board, shuttled by ambulance to an open space, loaded into a helicopter and flown to the trauma center at Mercy Medical Center in Merced. There I was scanned, stitched, braced and sent home with my slightly traumatized but heroic pregnant wife.

At the hospital they told me I had broken a bone at the base of my skull called the occipital condyle. Over the next three days I would learn that I also broke my cheek bone (zygomatic arch) and had compressed my T8 vertebra. The following few months were an exercise in pain management.

I happy to say now that I’m mostly recovered. My back still gets tired but it’s getting stronger every day. I’m able to ride my bike again and enjoy getting out on the road.

After the pain meds wore off and I had time to reflect, I was initially curious about the crash itself. I wondered what I could have done to avoid it. I wondered why this time I hadn’t been able to ‘roll with the punches’ when I had avoided serious injury in the past.

After my curiosity about the actual event was satisfied I began to think about what might have been. I thought about other riders who hadn’t been so lucky. I thought about track fixture Joe Fineman who is still in the hospital after crashing only a week or two after my accident. I thought about our friend Pat Currant who was killed by a car one summer day after a series of crashes during spring races. While my neck and back were painful I consider myself lucky to be walking and breathing.

Ultimately I had to consider why I was willing to take such risks as part of my hobby. I ride and race my bike to stay physically fit. It seems counter productive to participate in a hobby that could easily result in critical injury. Since my crash I’ve found myself paying more attention to local race accidents. It seems almost weekly I hear a story of serious injury. It has definitely made me pause. Bike racing is fun but it isn’t worth missing a single day with a daughter or son. Cycling brought my wife and I together but racing isn’t worth missing a future with her. So my crash has lead to a great deal of soul searching about the future of bike racing in this family. I will race again. I have already raced two time trials since my crash. I love bike racing and I would hate for my last race to be the one which I can’t remember ending. But rest assured that my future in bike racing will have a different look than it has in the past.

Be safe out there.

Cherry Pie

I headed up to Napa yesterday morning to watch a few of the early races. I was planning to come back for the afternoon's Star Studded Extravaganza but homework help got in the way. Turns out all the EuroStars stayed home leaving our local heroes to slug it out.

There are a few pics from the day here.

Sleeping through the night

I am at week 28 of my pregnancy.

For several weeks, I had horrible calf, shin and foot cramps which woke me up throughout the night, in addition to nerve pain in my heel. All of this seemed due to circulation issues related to the dramatic increase in blood volume one has at this stage of pregnancy.

I experimented with all sorts of things, from regular midnight trips to the foam roller, to compression socks, to calcium/magnesium pills, to Mike's fabulous foot and calve massages, to sleeping with my feel elevated. Each helped in its own unique way, but no combination of these treatments seemed to completely alleviate the problem.

Having biked all 7 days of the past week (130 miles this week!) and not once waking up in the middle of the night, I am now convinced that biking is the miracle cure.

Ok, you doubt me. You're thinking placebo effect. But I swear, it's the cure. This weekend was the minty team camp at the Kloverdale KOA. In addition to karaoke, Jay's super-pro photo shoot, and lots of laughs, I hung in on a 50 mile ride today, which included a whole lot more time in zones 3-4 than I had done in many moons. By "a whole lot more" I mean only that my 10min. max power was in zone 3/4, not that any significant among of time was there. But the little guy and I did hit 670 watts at some point hanging on to a city-line sprint which, at +30pounds and +6.5 months if of pregnancy felt pretty damn good.

Once constant question which comes up again and again is whether it's safe to have my HR rise above 140 beats per minute which seems to be the internet's conventional wisdom. This article is the most comprehensive one I've found yet which responds to this issue and encourages women to use the Borg rating for perceived exertion over a flat HR number.

My HR did hit 189 for a brief moment today (I swear I sat up after that!), and the little guy is kicking like crazy at the moment, so I'm assuming that all is well and both he and mom just need a good night's sleep! Luckily, the sleeping seems to be going well this week.

Not in my backyard...

From Monday's SF Chronicle:
" Emotions are running high in usually placid Piedmont over where hundreds of children should attend classes while an elementary school undergoes seismic reconstruction.
When school administrators proposed busing kids a few miles down the hill, out of the tony enclave and into Emeryville, you'd have thought they had committed treason.
A group of "concerned Piedmont parents" took out a half-page ad in the town paper railing against the move and noting that 24 registered sex offenders live within a mile of the Emeryville school.
"If a Piedmont student or teacher is assaulted (or worse) at the Emeryville campus and the Piedmont School District is sued...what additional liability does the school's legal counsel thing that Piedmont's taxpayers would bear?" the ad in the Piedmont Post asked."

As a public school teacher myself, nothing gets my blood boiling more than the assumption that safety issues are more important for your own kids, than other families children. If the Emeryville schools aren't safe enough for Piedmont kids, then why aren't Piedmont parents up in arms about the Emeryville kids who have no choice but to attend these schools?

Chew on that one.

near the close of my 2nd trimester

25 = number of weeks pregnant


30 = number of pounds gained


1= number of times I fell while cross country skiing last weekend and wondered if a fall on icy snow was a very good idea


1= number of times I've woken up in the morning with a pulled muscle as the result of a midnight charlie-horses


4=number of east bay pregnant bike racers i currently have to bike with

1,713= number of miles i've biked with our little Buddah