From Fahrschule to Skiing... and Unlikely Segue

Liz and I had a little conversation regarding stick shifts, that interestingly enough, brought up the topic of skiing.  Liz compared learning to drive stick as an adult, to learning how to ski as an adult.  Terrifying at first, but exhilarating once you've learned.   The reason I find this so interesting, is that coincidentally, skiing has something to do with why I have to learn to drive stick at the moment.

Now, just to orient you, I have never liked skiing.  I hate snow (though I do like sledding).  Being outside, surrounded by ice cold water, regardless of its crystalline structure, is just plain uncomfortable.   Add a little wind, and it gets miserable.  Proper gear helps, but I can never get my face covered in such a way that I am comfortable - yet not blinded by the condensation on my glasses.

Even if you could take away the snow, there's the really unnatural feeling that occurs when you strap long sticks onto your feet, and then try to move.  Then, there are the heights.  I do not like being above sea level.  There isn't enough oxygen and it is cold.  Plus, you have that feeling of imminent death when looking down a mountain.  It scares me, and not in a good way.

Now, suppose I were able to get to the top of a snowy mountain and look down without throwing up or passing out (or both).  The next step would be to go down.  I have studied physics.  I understand potential energy.  I understand acceleration, and conservation of momentum.  That very last one is the most important.  For most mountains are not perfectly smooth slopes.  They come with trees, rocks and other skiers.  Depending upon size, at least the first two obstacles do not move when hit by a human, even at breakneck speed (hmmm.... I think there is an obvious etymology associated with that adjective).  Thus, conservation of momentum tends to mostly affect one's skull and the contents therein.  If one is lucky enough, perhaps the skull is spared and only the spine needs to pay.  Or just a major bone or two...

What does all this have to do with manual transmissions?  Well, for a while, we traded 'our' car for M's dad's car, which has an automatic transmission.  We could have kept the car longer (until the snow melted?  I was hoping...), but M's mom has to have knee surgery.  She had hoped to put it off until we left, but she has been in constant pain for weeks now :(, so she finally had to give in and do it now.  (There is a long recovery - but we are all hoping that she can be better - and pain free, by spring).  This all means that M's mom cannot drive a car with a clutch for quite some time.

Now, we are talking about knees, so you know we are getting back to skiing.  This last part is definitely not funny, and if you see something you think is sarcastic, it is most certainly not meant that way.  Ir's a pretty sad story - but it is also family history, so I wanted to write it down.

I knew for a long time that M's mom had knee trouble.  She had had surgery just around the time that M and I met, and she has had pain on and off as long as I have known her.  I also knew that the knee troubles started when she was quite young, because she once told us that she had wanted 5 children, but after two pregnancies, the doctors told her that her knee would not hold up for a third. But, I never knew how the original injury occurred.

Well, you guessed it - skiing.  In college, she went on  a ski trip to Freiburg.  She fell, and managed to break her leg, very, very badly.  This was in the mid-1960s, so orthopedic medicine was not terribly advanced.  She was placed in a hospital bed, in a room with a bunch of other skiers, all with legs wrapped in bandages and plaster and held up with a pulley (like the typical hospital scenes in movies - remember Sigourney Weaver in 'Working Girl'?).  After several weeks, they discovered it hadn't been set quite right, so they adjusted and set her up again.  I asked her if they at least gave her lots of pain meds, but she didn't remember.  I told her I hoped they gave her a bunch of morphine...

Months later, after being released from the hospital, and being told to 'ride a bike' to get the seriously atrophied leg back in shape (so much for physical therapy in the 1960s!), she went to another doctor because she was in constant pain.  He looked at her knee and said "No, that's not right."  The leg had been set wrong, and as a result, her knee was turned in.  The 'fix' was to break the leg and reset.  Very understandably, she declined the procedure, having just spent half a year in bed with an intolerably itchy cast and who knows how much pain.

The surgery in the late 1990s set the leg properly, but years of strain on the knee left the joint in trouble.  So finally, this month, she will get the knee replaced, and with any luck, this spring, she will have 50 years (!!) of  physical repercussions from one ski trip reversed for good.   Some other repercussions, such as the 3 siblings M and his sister never had, well, we just have to imagine what might have been.