Ride Day 52

I woke up before dawn today and packed my bags. When it was finally light enough to ride safely I hit the road. My leg was pretty stiff when I first started out but it loosened up after a few miles. Maybe the adrenaline from the attacking farm dogs helped me wake up. I would like to straighten up some misconceptions people have about the way I treat my body. I am getting a lot of flack from people freaked out that I had a seizure on the road and blaming me for riding too hard and causing the seizure. Then they tell me I should have gone to the hospital right away and taken care of my injuries better so that I would heal properly and so on. Well on the first point, about me causing the seizure by pushing myself too hard, that is absolutely not the reason that I had the seizure. The one and only reason I had the seizure is because when I rode the ferry from Dauphin Island to Fort Morgan the vibrations on the ferry were strong and the vibrations set my nerves on edge so bad that I thought I was going to have one on the boat. I made it through the boat ride without an attack but I was having lots of electrical sensations shooting all up and down my body after the ferry ride. That was causing my pain to start building up. Lots of people tell me I should have called an ambulance right then. That never works out well for me. I always get transported to a hospital with doctors that are not familiar with my situation and they want to do thousands of dollars in invasive tests that I do not need. So instead of calling an ambulance I jumped on my bike and started to ride and while I was riding I started doing yoga and biofeedback to try to get my system back under control. Usually that works for me. In this case I had an attack anyway despite my attempt to prevent it. After the seizure stopped I got back on my bike and again worked on my yoga and biofeedback to get under control again. Usually by the next morning after a night of agonizing pain I wake up recovered and back to feeling normal. In this case I felt normal everywhere except my lower left leg. I either injured it in my fall off the bike or I tore some tissue when my muscles were tugging against each other during the seizure was my immediate assessment. In the end after all the hospital drama that I got sucked into yesterday that was also the conclusion of all the doctors. I do know my body pretty well. I have been having this seizure problem for twenty years now. I don’t like it but I deal with it. It will not stop me from doing whatever I want to do. Sometimes that involves elevated risk as compared to someone without the same type of problems, but such is life. What am I supposed to do to be safe? Sit in a wheelchair getting fatter by the day the rest of my life? I will never do that. If I die because I have a seizure and I fall in front of a truck while riding my bike that is ok by me. At least I will have died while living a life. My ride today went smoothly from King Lake to Marianna Florida. My sore leg was not a problem at all. I took very few pics because the scenery is just the same all day long and it has been the same since I left Pensacola. It is just a road with longleaf pine and oak trees lining both sides, and the terrain is mostly gently rolling hills. The one weird thing I find with the roads here in Florida so far is that they are either top notch brand new roads with a smooth surface and wide shoulder or they are narrow rough roads with no room for a bike to ride at all. There is nothing in between just good roads and bad roads. In the towns it has been mostly bad roads with no room to ride. I had more people honk at me to get out of their way today than I have had on this entire trip so far. I have heard it only gets worse the further into Florida I go except for the cities with universities where the people are more used to bikers. I will learn as I go. At the end of the day I went to a campground called Arrowhead to camp but when they told me the ripoff price for a primitive tent campsite I turned around and walked out because it was the highest price I have ever been given to set up a tent. So instead I checked into a hotel which was less than their price to camp and I have air conditioning and tv etc. Florida is not very tent friendly. They tend to set camps up for RVs and charge tents the same price even though we don’t use any of the expensive hookups that the RVs use. There are not many tent campers here because a lot of people are afraid of the snakes which are fairly common everywhere here. More later….