A trip to the emergency room

Kerry started this adventure back in Florida just hours after injuring his hand with a power tool. The injury hasn't kept him from driving all the way from Florida to Ohio, and then biking for a week, but it hasn't been properly recovering.

Doesn't look too bad, but have you ever tried to wash just 2 fingers and keep the other 2 dry?

Despite taking antibiotics, the hand is getting infected. We set out this morning, hoping to find an urgent Care facility along our route where he could get his fingers cleaned up. After trying a couple of places, we got directions to an urgent care facility on the east side of Carmel that could see Kerry this morning.

We took a combination of bike paths and roads to get to the east side of Carmel. We are extremely impressed by the excellent bike paths in Westfield and Carmel. Almost every major road is accompanied by a bike path. There are lots of new housing developments and new commercial properties. Perhaps there is some kind of zoning law that requires new developments to provide bike paths. Most of the new housing is upscale, the north side of the Indianapolis metro area appears to be booming. The metro area has a population of more than 2 million people.

More houses will pop up here in a year or two.

The urgent Care folks looked at Kerry's fingers and decided he needed to go to the ER. So we crossed back to the west side of Carmel on a different set of bike paths. Amazingly, the urgent care place didn't charge Kerry anything for looking at his hand.

The ER was a different story. They unwrapped his hand, took a look, decided it didn't need to be cleaned out, and wrapped it back up. Unlike the urgent Care, they are going to charge for taking a look. They are going to charge a lot, but they haven't revealed yet how much. Health care is insane. Imagine going into a supermarket, buying groceries, and having no idea how much they will cost until you receive a bill in a few weeks.

The ER did prescribe some more antibiotics, and they did do a culture test. The culture test took quite a while, and revealed that Kerry is lacking in culture. They recommended listening to opera, visiting some museums, and reading classic literature.

We had been planning to ride 67 miles today to Turkey Run state park. It was after 2:00 by the time the culture test was done and we left the ER. Getting the antibiotic prescription filled took more time. After 6 hours of pursuing medical treatment, we decided to bail on Turkey Run and stay at a nearby hotel.

Jeanna is a master planner. She has built rest days into our schedule to deal with just such circumstances. In fact, we were scheduled to spend tomorrow lounging around Turkey Run, so we will be back on schedule when we ride to Turkey Run tomorrow.

The recumbent tandem has some of the longest bike chains you will ever see.

As the chain stretches, it seems to be getting dangerously close to the tensioner.

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