The Bruise!

I was taking a shower the other day – no, it’s not one of those stories – and noticed a dark mark in the centre of my chest. It was the grey, the colour of cement. I’ve been building a stone wall recently and I thought the mark might be the result of splashed cement so I tried scrubbing at it with a sponge; it wouldn’t budge.

After the shower I put some glasses on and checked the mark again and discovered that it was actually a bruise! I was somewhat surprised because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out when I’d hurt myself. The wall I’m building is still quite low, (building stone walls is a very slow business), so it wasn’t the result of a stone falling on me or anything like that.

I was baffled. Spontaneous bruising can be symptomatic of some very nasty conditions – oh, I can be a real hypochondriac sometimes. One of the down sides of doing a degree in human anatomy and physiology is that you learn just what a complicated and delicate thing the human body is. Mine, of course, is more delicate than most; I’m such a wimp!

I took me a few days to figure out the cause of the mysterious bruise and it was just a simple bruise. It wasn’t anything like purpura, leukemia, thrombocytopenia, or vasculitis. No, it was none of those horrible-sounding diseases. It was caused by, and this is the reason for this entry in my Cycle Race Reports blog, my cycle water bottle! Yes, the simple bidon; (did you know that the French have a special word for cycle bottles).

How can bruising be caused by a plastic water bottle? I hear you ask.

It’s simple really. When I take a drink during a ride, I close the little plastic stopper by banging the top of the bidon against my chest before I replace the bottle into its cage. The stops joice spilling all over my nice clean bike (honest), and saves me losing valuable drink over bumpy roads.

Now, the cyclist riding position means that I am often bent over on the bars when I take a drink. So I end up closing the bidon against my breastbone. This is the least padded place on my chest – hence the bruising.

Case closed!

Unfortunately, I don’t know of a better way to close the stopper, the rest of my torso is so flabby that the stopper won’t close on anything else other than my breastbone. I’ll have to put up with the bruising I guess. Hey ho!

Next blog: Saint Armel (56).