We awoke yesterday to quite the surprise. Snow blanketed the entire landscape. It was cold, and it was windy, and it was obvious the snow wouldn't be going away anytime soon. We ventured out in the early afternoon wearing our usual hiking boots; too soon yet for winter boots. The snow underfoot was soft, but the ground has been well hardened with frost, and the foliage on the forest floor covered with snow which in places also had developed into icy patches, making downhill forays fairly slippery, requiring some degree of caution as we proceeded.

We came across one of our ravine-rambling friends, who walks his three border collies as regularly as we come into the ravine. This is a man for whom the past year has been a nightmare of problems. This is a man who is almost a fanatic about physical fitness. Not surprising since he has been for years a member of an RCMP swat team. He'd had to step back from his profession, this year, and certainly not voluntarily, but because the turn his life had taken gave him little other choice.

Little did he know when one of his racing bicycle's wheels got caught in a sewer grate on a main street sending him hurtling over the handlebars and onto an extremely hard surface, causing his shoulderblade to break, that this, in comparison to what he would experience at a later date, was a trifle. It took him months, understandably, after surgery that saw a metal plate, rods and screws put in place to help his shoulder mend, to recover his former physical capacity. Through the ongoing pain he continued to work out, to compete in area runs and bicycle events.

And then he began to experience memory loss and wretchedly painful headaches. It took some time for the correct diagnosis, but finally a neurosurgeon informed him that he was suffering from water on his brain, and required surgery to relieve the pressure. Another long wait ensued, but the surgery eventually was carried out, and then it was discovered that the shunt that had been inserted at the base of his brain was draining the water (through his body and into a bag) too quickly, so that the headaches and the dizziness continued. A series of adjustments was carried out and although his condition improved to the point where his memory retention was restored and the dizziness gone, the crushing headaches remained.

Another surgery has been scheduled, this time to replace the shunt which was supposed to be 89% effective but turned out to be 60% effective, putting another model in its place, in the hope that the second shunt will solve the problem completely to enable him to regain the capacity to live a normal life. That is, as normal as possible for someone for whom a shunt carrying away brain fluid represents a permanent 'solution' to a problem no one knows how it resulted.

That surgery will take precedence over another one to be scheduled to remove the metal plate, rods and screws that held his shoulder together, because their presence is now causing excruciating pain. Since the separated shoulder has now healed, their presence is considered redundant. It is, obviously, the lesser of the two emergencies.

But the neurosurgeon insists the shoulder surgery must follow the brain surgery, to minimize the chances of catastrophic infection following neurosurgery. How's that for a hard-luck health story?