Recuperation - Day 1

28 March - Woke up a few times in the middle of the night with a need to readjust or to relieve myself - the hand isn’t aching too much but i'm keeping to the minimum dosage of prescribed drugs to keep the worst of it at bay. Had my first shower with a garbage bag over my arm and am really not looking forward to repeats of that one. Contact lenses are a bit of an issue, cleaning them is a bit difficult with the cast and last night a couple of times my vision just went completely - blurring away like a camera going out of focus, hope it was the drugs that caused that because I really could not handle having to deal with another medical problem right now (am not sure but a cold might have invaded my body in the past few days). Spoke to the WCB agent and Novex and intimattd that I might be heading away for a while but would continue do everything my doctor told me to do and have been mostly reassured that my cover will continue throughout my recuperation. A brief trip downtown resulted in a few errands being completed including the purchase of a sorely needed pair of jeans. Bumped into a fair few of the couriers who were all pretty shocked at the appearance of my hand - its covered in antiseptic paint that makes me look like i've dipped it in a vat of boiling oil but to tell the truth i've a feeling that the worst aspect of this entire process will be the negotiating around the chunks oplaster that have immobilsed a great deal of my hand. The pain is pretty manageable and its not very swollen - I just can’t touch my thumb to any other part of the hand - this means no gripping, no okay signals (although I can still do a passable fonzi and flipping the bird is no problem) and no way of rolling a joint (well, that can only be a good thing).
Hve been relieved of my radio and blackberry during my convalescence, am not sure whether i'll be returning to Novex but it will certainly not be for a while if I do. Am slightly irritated with the company for hosting a staff appreciation day at Richmond for all of the drivers - the bikers have been promised a team dinner since December last year which has never materialised and almost certainly never will for this particular biker. The bike messengers don’t make a hell of a lot of money for the company - although a couple of us usually earned more than the drivers (and our rates are less than driver rates which means the company gets more although driver expenses are considerably higher than bikers) - but what the bikers do, at least the good ones, is maintain the big contracts for the company. In downtown the major contracts are with a couple of law firms, banks and management companies and a fair whack of their work is in the core with extremely tight deadlines, if it wasn't for us getting all the urgent ones done on time Novex would simply lose those contracts and with them all of the higher paying long distance and overnight jobs. The big contracts seem to float around all of the major courier companies, when a client starts to see too many lates they will just go to one of the other messenger companies; undercutting is also a popular method of gettingbusiness for some of the fleets (Novex is renowned for havingthe cheapest rates in town). In the time i've been at novex we've lost a big contract and gained a big one and the grapevine says that the issues that occurred Christmas rush didn't help our reputation much but the grapevine is notoriously unreliable. In any event, its heartening to know that Jason has been a bit overwhelmed because of my absence but I also have to tell myself that its an SEP, at least for the next 8 weeks.