Me: "That's one of the side benefits of the steel rod in my shin. Without it, I might get wrangled into... well, not 'taking up' skydiving, but at least jumping out of a plane once to check it off my bucket list. This gives me a doctor's excuse."
RX: "I'm of two minds on that... The jumping out of the plane, I mean; not the rod in the shin."
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Overheard in the Office:
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32 comments:
I have a similar excuse for not dancing, which I totally made up.
Wow, i had no idea that was a disqualifier. My uncle skydove at sixty, and he had pins bolts screws and i think a sawzall in him. Knowing my uncle though, i bet he lied on the hold harmless.
og,
It's not the screws that can be a problem.
The problem with an intramedullary nail is that, given sufficient force, it can bend. Bone doesn't bend so well, and so it just explodes off the rod in little fragments...
Makes sense.
This thing with jumping out of airplanes, you do realize they're actually really really high off the ground, right?
Not that I'm a coward or anything. Certainly not. "Terrified like a little girl" is a totally different concept, thank you very much.
People always ask "Why would you jump out of a perfectly good airplane?". What they don't realize is there ain't NO SUCH THING as a "perfectly good airplane".
My Dad's question was much more relevant; "Why do you practice something you have to get right EVERY time?"
Boat Guy,
Is that like asking why doctors "practice" medicine?
Is that wrangled or wangled?
Boat Guy, reminds me about the joke about the suicide bomber instructor. "Watch this guys, I'¨m only going to show you this once!"
Do note however that for most people the first jump will be tandem, connected to someone with experience, who's going to do the cord pulling, steering and landing. That way when they jump solo, they will already know what to expect.
Of course you can always do a tandem jump on a decent day, those use an oversized 'chute and are good fun. They're also a good bit safer in that the experenced tandem host bring's you into an upright landing with a higher degree of ease upon landing.
You know you can actually slide right in on your butt, right?
On my tandem jump, I had to do that because the guy had somebody break her ankle coming down a few weeks earlier, and didn't want a repeat.
Also...when you're that high up, your brain doesn't really seem to register the height. I'm pretty sure we're not wired for that kind of fall.
AGREE WITH MY MARITIME COLLEAGUE
WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO LEAVE A PERFECTLY FUNCTIONING AIRCRAFT IN MIDFLIGHT ???
I gave up skydiving due to health issues. I still miss it. My daughter grew up hearing the phrase "There's no such thing as a perfectly good airplane". Last year for father's day she gave me a t-shirt with that printed on it.
I'll second Cormac, slide in. If you haven't scratched the adrenaline gland recently it can lead to the purchase of a ZRX1200. Big fun.
Scofflaw
"Why do you practice something you have to get right EVERY time?"
Boat Guy, I promise you that if you jump out of a plane, 99.9% of the time you will hit the ground. Was that so hard to figure out?
Dad had a similar reason (lots of metal in the lower leg), when he quit sport-jumping after 150 jumps, back in the '60s. Then when I wanted to do it in the '90s, he came along, and put on a modern parachute and used its 3:1 glide ratio to look like he was stepping off an escalator in his stand-up landing.
Well, sure there ain't no such thing as a "perfectly good" airplane ... but I've never been in one that wasn't good enough ...
As we watched a Beechcraft Model 18 abort a group high jump to land on the grass strip under partial power, I heard one of the guys at Paradise Parachuting say, "They ask me 'How can you jump out of a perfectly good airplane?', and I answer 'Son, you ain't seen our aircraft. Even the pilots wear 'chutes.'"
And they did, too.
Did a tandem jump for a friend's birthday celebration. Plan was to sit in the doorway, lean forward and fall out at 8,000', one forward roll into stable spread, and fall to 3,000 where we'd deploy the chute.
Went as planned. The visual of the plane getting tiny was so cool that I forgot about the falling sensation, and by the time I got oriented in the spread position we had stopped accelerating. There was the wind noise, and the ground getting closer in a hurry, but without the acceleration to give the "falling sensation" it was pretty cool. Descending under canopy was fun.
You know more about your pins than I ever will, but I marvel the disclaimers and side effects list on medical miracles in commercials ever gets anything sold under a doctor's signature.
Jumping, static line, is all about keeping feet and knees together - just blood pumping cargo of less than four hundred pounds.
After the door exit, the silence of the air once the chute has deployed is wonderful, and in a couple of minutes gravity will reclaim your attention, if you didn't luck into a thermal.
A close friend of mine just survived a 3100' fall partially wrapped in a double malfunction. Last week he was cleared back to full duty and flight status. As he describes the jump, "Texas stopped me before I fell any further."
I want to jump, but I'm still 75 pounds away from the weight limit. That means I'm about halfway there, though, since last July.
If I had a steel shin, though . . . I dunno. I know it's supposed to be possible to land softly, but I also know it's possible to land . . . otherwise. :)
I have one static line jump to my credit. I was 62 at the time. I wasn't interested in a tandem jump because I didn't want to be just a passenger. I jumped from a Cessna 182 which required me to crawl out of the cabin and hang on to the wing strut before plummeting into the void. So technically I didn't really 'jump'. Today's rectangular canopies fly just like an airplane and you fly a rectangular landing pattern just like a plane does. There is very little impact upon landing because you are not coming straight down but rather flying to a soft landing. You flare to a landing just like an airplane. I was actually a bit disappointed in the experience since I expected it to be terrifying, and it wasn't even close. I would like to make a solo freefall someday but alas money for training is just not available.
My mother made tandem freefalls on her 79th and 80th birthdays.
Tam,
why are the rods not removed after the bone has healed properly? I realize that would probably entail a further healing cycle to fill in some of the space that the rod and pins/screws were occupying, but the long term side effects of them remaining would seem to encourage this.
@Will, I believe you have to break the bone to get the rod out.
Rods and pins are typically placed INSIDE the bones to promote proper healing (as opposed to plates and screws which attach outside the bones).
"Removing them after the bone heals properly" makes therefore about as much sense as taking the car apart after you fix it to make sure you did it right, except with the added proviso that cars don't get the risk of post-op infections from repeated unnecessary surgeries, and they don't scream when you open them or whimper while they heal. Unlike people.
The solution to extra parts in your leg, as I suspect Joe Theissman will tell anyone, is not to explode them into bitsy pieces in the first place.
I'll stick to Submarines, and leaves the Aircraft to Brigid and OldNFO.
Of course, in MY situation, our Mathamatical Goal was to equal the number of Surfaces to the Number of Dives. Never did matter how many there where, just so it came out even.
Back in 1985, when the grass was greener, and the sky was much more blue, myself and two other young Marines drove up to the North Shore of Oahu to go skydiving. We signed some waivers, got the obligatory "instruction" and took off in a high wing Cessna, which lacked a door (easier ingress and, more importantly, egress, I suppose). There were five of us aboard: pilot; jump-master (I guess. He was the one telling us to let go of the wing. He might have well been a barker at the fair); and we Marines three.
It was a very small, extremely loud plane. The three jumpers were stacked in a straight line towards the tail of the crate, with the biggest in front, and thus, first to jump. I was second, with a feather-merchant bringing up the rear.
When we got to altitude, the first victim attached his chute for the static line jump, and he then got hold of the wing strut and dangled his feet in the air, and finally received the instruction: "Let go!".
Naturally, he did not. Much to the dismay of the pilot and barker, he refused, and tried his best to get back in the bird. After much cussing, and waggling of wings, he let go with a loud wail. The rest of us jumped without trouble, and I immediately went back up for another go. But twice was enough. Have never done it again.
Yup. WAAAY too much of a control freak to ever tandem. Kinda like Clint Eastwoods "If there's a gun around I want to control it"; if there's a parachute involved I want it attached TO ME.
Rode a submarine too and fortunately the math worked out. Given a choice t'ween the two I'll take the parachute...
I'm also of the opinion that one shouldn't depart a functioning airplane. Then again, I hate flying commercial these days because I don't have my own ejection seat anymore. :(
How can you both love and hate something at the same time? It's actually pretty easy, Jumping scared the hell out of me everytime, if I was made of sterner stuff I would have more than 12 jumps (in my defense, on average 1 of 4 attempts to get out the door were successful, plenty of scratches in the air, door got stuck, too windy, pilot was too high the first time and didn't want to circle back because he had a beer waiting, etc...not that I was upset if the weather turned.)
Of course the falling was always nice, that floating sensation, and just looking around and enjoying the view (except the couple of night jumps, and that cloudy night I slipped the wrong way and stopped all lateral movement, feet knees face, ouch)
But the truth is we do it to prove we're men (not men men, but human), doing something that scares the crap out of you, facing that fear and going on green was just something I had to do to prove to myself that I was more than the circumstances around me.
Funny thing is, you don't have to jump to do that, there are plenty other ways to face your fears and show that yes, you are human and not just an animal. SO, pick a fear and face it down and you'll be happier for it, even if it's not jumping out of an airplane.
I made 11 sport jumps back around 1970, with the Huntsville Sport Parachute Club. I think the last five were free-falls. I don't think I want to do that again, but at least I know what to do if I _do_ have to jump. (Arch, look, reach, pull.)
We had none of that sissy tandem stuff back then, we went out all by ourselves on our first jumps. Heck, we didn't really have training, we had "training." Owhell, we were young and dumb, etc.
A former next-door neighbor, a prissy old guy, had one more jump than I. His twelfth jump was at about 0300 on June 6th, 1944. He spent the rest of the night running around the countryside with a Thompson and shooting people.
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